Reinhold Niebuhr : prophet from America

MODERN CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARIES SERIES

General Editor:

DONALD ATTWATER

REINHOLD NIEBUHR:
PROPHET FROM AMERICA

He who praises a man ought to follow him, and if he be not
ready to follow him he' ought not to praise him. St. John
Chrysostom.

MODERN CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARIES

REINHOLD NIEBUHR:
PROPHET FROM AMERICA

By

D. R. DAVIES

Author of The Two Humanities, Down Peacock's Feathers, etc.

JAMES CLARKE & CO., LTD.

5 WARDROBE PLACE, CARTER LANE, LONDON, E.C.4

I

DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO

URSULA M. NIEBUHR

THE WIFE AND COMRADE OF THE
SUBJECT OF THE BOOK

Printed in Great Britain by
The Camelot Press Ltd., London and Southampton

PREFACE

To write a book on a contemporary thinker, especially
a thinker of such eminence as Reinhold Niebuhr, has
in it an element of presumption. When all is said, nobody
can interpret Niebuhr so well as Niebuhr himself. There is
the man, a living influence in two continents. His books are
easily available for all who care to read. They are written
in vigorous, clear, simple American English which anyone
of average intelligence can grasp. Why then write a book
about a man which, at best, will be inferior to the books of
the man himself? A very reasonable question, and very much
to the point. The following pages can only be justified by
a satisfactory answer to that question.

First, then, in a series of .books about contemporary
Christian revolutionaries, if such a series is to be remotely
representative, the omission of Reinhold Niebuhr is im-
possible. That in itself constitutes a sufficiently good reason
for writing on Niebuhr. A series purporting to describe and
discuss living Christian revolutionaries which omitted
Niebuhr would be ridiculous. Comparisons are invidious,
but this at least may be said: that among the Christian
revolutionaries of both Europe and America to-day, there
is, most certainly, none greater, more significant or more
influential than Reinhold Niebuhr. A series which by-passed
him would be self-condemned. "Where MacTavish sits is
the head of the table." Niebuhr is one of the most vital
centres of Christian thinking in politics and sociology
to-day.

But there is another and even stronger reason for this
book. The present writer has been deeply impressed, and
very much surprised at first, by the frequency with which
well-educated and intelligent people have confessed that
they do not understand Dr. Niebuhr, that they "can't get

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6 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

the hang" of what he is saying. In lecturing to students and
clergy and ministers of all denominations, the present writer
has come across scores of men (among whom Oxford and
Cambridge were well represented) who failed to grasp
Dr. Niebuhr's position. They confessed to being confused
by what they could not help thinking was Dr. Niebuhr's
inconsistencies and self-contradictions. As one quite in-
telligent person put it: "Niebuhr no sooner makes a
statement than he seems to affirm the opposite." In other
words, there is a number of people who, in spite of their
eagerness to read and understand Niebuhr, fail to understand
what he is saying, because of their unfamiliarity with his
way of thinking. Reinhold Niebuhr is a supremely "dialec-
tical" thinker. In his mental process, "either . . . or" is
balanced by "both . . . and." Readers who can only think
in terms of "either ... or" therefore find him difficult, and
so are missing one of the most vital and profound contri-
butions to contemporary Christian thought. This fact seems
to indicate the need for a book of the kind attempted here.
But in many cases the failure to understand Dr. Niebuhr
is due, in the final analysis, not to inadequate intellectual
processes, but to a defective attitude to life, and more
especially to religion. This attitude may be described as an
insufficient appreciation of the tragic element in moral
experience, and of the abysmal element in religion, par-
ticularly in Christianity. Men to whom life is essentially
simple and capable of a purely rational comprehension will
always find it difficult to understand men who are burdened
by the realization of the ultimate inscrutability and incalcul-
ability of life and religion. To this latter class belongs Dr.
Niebuhr. His awareness of the depth beneath the depths
makes it impossible for him to comprehend man's tragic
history in a neat formula, without torn and ragged edges.
In the contradictory being of man there is an ultimate abyss
which defies smooth, rational statement. Dr. Niebuhr is

PREFACE 7

unusual and exceptional in this: reared in a civilization of
optimism, which manifested the maximum of human power
over environment, he nevertheless was impressed more by
man's tragic weakness than by his dazzling achievements.
In this he is a very untypical American, but very typical of
prophetic Christianity. In his sociological thinking he has
anticipated a whole social development. He has kept one
step ahead of history. That's what makes him a prophetic,
Christian revolutionary. But also it is what makes him
difficult for so many good, uncomplicated souls to under-
stand.

I have undertaken the task of endeavouring to interpret
Dr. Niebuhr to English readers with some diffidence, yet
also with some relish. With diffidence, because one is
anxious to do justice to a great contemporary figure in
Christian theology and sociology. But I am emboldened to
essay this task by the knowledge that my own theological
and political development has been somewhat similar to
Dr. Niebuhr's. In his generous too generous review of
my first book, On To Orthodoxy (vide British Weekly,
September 14, 1939), Dr. Niebuhr wrote that his own
experience had been similar to mine. This means that I
approach Dr. Niebuhr's thinking from the inside, from an
inner comprehension which considerably illuminates the
study of his writing.

I have accepted the invitation to write this book with
relish for the simple reason that it gives me the opportunity
to express publicly my great indebtedness to Dr. Niebuhr.
I first came across his work during a deep crisis in my own
inner life, which Dr. Niebuhr, more than any contemporary
thinker, helped me to resolve. If I can mediate him to men
and women who may be struggling in the throes of some
similar crisis, I shall feel amply justified and rewarded.

I must not conclude this already too lengthy preface
without expressing my warmest thanks to Dr. Niebuhr for

8 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

his willingness to supply me with information. I have the
liveliest and happiest recollections of a whole precious day
which he gave to me in the midst of a crowded visit he made
to England in 1943. His generous friendship, no less than
his profound and acute writings, inspire in me the deepest
gratitude. Needless to say, he bears no responsibility for this
book which is entirely mine.

My grateful thanks are also due to Dr. Niebuhr's English
publishers, Messrs. James Nisbet & Co., Ltd., for kind
permission to make quotations from his Gifford lectures,
The Nature and Destiny of Man, and Beyond .Tragedy.

D. R. DAVIES

BOOKS BY REINHOLD NIEBUHR

The reader is advised to begin his study of Niebuhr with a little work
w ich will give him some feeling of Niebuhr the man, Leaves from the
Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Here the reader will see Niebuhr struggling
to adapt himself to the demands and duties of a parish ministry. It is the
struggle of an intensely human being, who will thus commend himself
to the reader. The best introduction to Niebuhr's work is, I think, the
book Does Modern Civilization Need Religion? in which are formulated
most of his characteristic ideas, which he presents in more developed
form in later work. The specific problem of the relevance of Christianity
to civilization is best studied, to begin with at least, in An Interpretation
of Christian Ethics. Niebuhr formulates the question here in more
systematic form. His critique of contemporary civilization can be read in
Moral Man and Immoral Society and in Reflections on the End of an Era.
The above volumes should be thoroughly read and mastered before
proceeding to the two volumes of Gifford lectures, but the reader should
make certain of reading them in the end, for these two volumes, The
Nature and Destiny of Man, are indispensable, books to be bought and
not just borrowed.

Does Modern Civilization Need Religion? Macmillan, 1928.
Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. R. R. Smith, New York,

1930.
The Contribution of Religion to Social Work. (Forbes Lectures.) Columbia

University Press, 1932.

Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1933.
Reflections on the End of an Era. Scribner, 1934.
An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. (Rauchenbusch Memorial Lectures.)

Harper, 1935.
Does the State and Nation Belong to God or the Devil? (Burge Memorial

Lecture.) S.C.M. Press, 1937.
The Protestant Opposition Movement in Germany, 1934-37. Friends of

Europe, 1937.
Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History. Nisbet,

1938.

Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist. S.C.M. Press, 1940.
Europe's Catastrophe and the Christian Faith. Nisbet, 1940.
Christianity and Power Politics. Scribner, 1940.

The Nature and Destiny of Man. (Gifford Lectures.) 2 vols. Nisbet, 1941-3.
Jews after the War. University Jewish Federation of Great Britain, 1943.
The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light. Nisbet, 1945.

CONTENTS

PREFACE . . . . ' . ; k . .5

BOOKS BY REINHOLD NIEBUHR ...- , . 9

I. THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY . .- . n

fl. MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT . . -* " . 35

HI. MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT . . _. .58

IV. THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING . 71

V. "THE THEORY OF THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION" . 88

The Making of a Revolutionary

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, as his name suggests, is of German
extraction, though he is a full American citizen. His
American birth and rearing, together with his German
origin, may partly account for the unusual combination in
him of qualities which nearly always are separate; for
Niebuhr is distinguished by the fact of an intense awareness
of ultimate problems allied with an equally intense pre-
occupation with the immediate, concrete, practical next
step. In most men these qualities exist in isolation from each
other. As a rule, men who are absorbed in the contemplation
of the final, ultimate problems of human existence are
oblivious to the relative, practical necessities under which
men have to live. They do not feel the pressure and the
urgency of the concrete political and social problems
demanding some kind of solution or other. The theologian
or philosopher, wrestling with the great problems of the
nature of being, the destiny of man, the purpose and
meaning of existence, usually has no mind for the immediate
political problem. And vice-versa, the man who finds the
breath of life in tackling the emerging problems of con-
temporary social and historic development hardly ever lifts
his mind to the level of final issues. Niebuhr is one of those
rare thinkers in whose mind these two phases the im-
mediate and the ultimate are in an organic, dynamic
relation. They are not static entities in his mind. It is not
that he has a spell, so to speak, during which his mind is
given over to immediate issues the new form of inter-
national relationships, the next step in social legislation,
etc.; then another spell during which his mind becomes
absorbed with questions of eschatology, the significance of

12 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Providence in history, etc. Niebuhr's thinking is a process
in which every immediate problem is set in the context of
the ultimate, and the ultimate reality is informed with
concrete historic content by its relation to immediate social
issues. His thinking faithfully reflects the tension of daily
experience.

This combination may be partly due, as already suggested,
to Niebuhr's German origin and to his American birth and
environment. In his veins there mingle the blood of the
German philosopher and that of the "Anglo-Saxon"
politician and practician. The German mind functions
naturally and at its best it is its genius in the contempla-
tion of the ultimate mysteries of thought. Characteristic of
the German mind is the Hegelian attempt to systematize
the Absolute, and the Kantian attempt to formulate the
nature of knowing, to relate practical reason and pure
reason. The raw material of German philosophy is the final
mystery of being. But English philosophy, from which the
chief element of the American mind derives, is concerned
mainly with practical political problems Hobbes and
what constitutes the state; Locke and what constitutes
society. Hume, it is true, goes beyond these questions but
Hume was a Scotsman. Americanism is a "stepping-stone"
of "Anglo-Saxon" mentality. It is in the nature of things
that pluralism should be an American philosophical pro-
duct, in which the Absolute is reduced to a mere succession
of relativities. American civilization had, of course, to deal
with an immediate practical problem, which brooked no
delay. Thus the American mind, which has been shaped by
the demands of the immediate, is the antithesis of the
German mind. But in Reinhold Niebuhr, the German
mentality and temper, with a zest for the immediate job to
be done these twain have been fused into a new mentality,
in which the concrete and the ultimate hold on to each
other in a restless tension.

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 13

He was born on June 21, 1892, the son of a German
Evangelical pastor, Gustav Niebuhr, so that he is a son of the
manse. And here it may be well to kill the legend, so wide-
spread in Great Britain, that he was reluctant to enter the
ministry. It is simply not true. He was brought up in a
pastor's home and he remembers, with gratitude, his
father's prayers at the family altar. His father, who was a
keen theological student, of liberal tendencies, and a deeply
cultured man, did not bring any pressure to bear on Niebuhr
to enter the ministry. But he relates that, after considerable
thought, he decided, on his own initiative, to become a
minister. It was with great rejoicing that his father heard
the news, to whom he communicated it in the simple words,
"Father, I want 'to become a minister." There can be no
doubt whatever that Niebuhr felt quite certain of his
vocation. He felt no reluctance of any kind about becoming
a minister. He did feel some doubt whether he should
exercise his ministry in the German Evangelical Church,
which was one of the smaller, lesser-known and narrower
off-shoots of the German Lutheran Church. Niebuhr
probably felt the urge to swim in the broader, fuller stream
of American ^religious life, compared to which the German
Evangelical Church of the early nineteen-hundreds was a
sluggish backwater. But Niebuhr's hesitation was not
whether to become a minister or not, but whether to be-
come a German Evangelical minister, and whether to
become a parish minister or a theological teacher. One of
Niebuhr's professors, Macintosh, influenced him in the
direction of theological teaching. On completion of his
course at Elmhurst College (the denominational school)
and Yale University, Niebuhr was "ordered", in accordance
with the practice of the body, to take up the parochial
ministry of Bethel Evangelical church in Detroit". With his
mind set on teaching, perhaps there was some reluctance to
enter on the work of a parish; for Niebuhr confesses that

14 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

he "entered and left the parish ministry against my in-
clinations . . ." 1

As a matter of fact, however, Niebuhr did not quite
complete the educational course he had originally intended.
After reading arts and a certain amount of theology at
Elmhurst College, he went to Yale with the idea of reading
for a doctorate in theology, for this was the necessary
passport to a professorship in theology. But before attaining
the degree Niebuhr as he himself puts it "quit." By the
time he graduated as master of arts, for which he read a
considerable amount of theology, he had become irritated
by the irrelevance of much of his theological study to the
actual daily life around him. I do not mean by this what so
many theological students mean when they revolt against
scientific discipline. Many men who merely dislike the
study, eg., of Biblical languages, church history, systematic
doctrine, etc., rationalize their reluctance to submit to
intellectual discipline by persuading themselves that all this
has nothing to do with the actual work of the ministry.
Their feeling of irrelevance is a convenient camouflage for
laziness. This was not what Niebuhr felt; for, quite obvi-
ously, the pursuit of ideas is a natural passion with him, an
activity delightful for its own sake. What he felt was some-
thing very different, and was the first symptom of his
possession by a Christian revolutionary spirit.

In the years of Niebuhr's theological training, religious
liberalism 2 was at its height, especially in America, where

1 Vide Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, p. xii. This is a
book of priceless wisdom for theological students. It consists of extracts
from a diary which Dr. Niebuhr kept during his thirteen years' pastorate.
An English edition would be a great boon to students. It would probably
save them from many of the errors and pitfalls in which the Christian
ministry of all denominations so amply abounds.

2 What term should one use to describe the theological tendency' which
was dominated by modern rationalism and the idea of inevitable
progress? "Humanism" is hardly correct, since it lacks the religious

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 15

it was the natural and almost inevitable consequence in
theology of the gigantic conquests of American skill and
technique. Orthodoxy was at a discount. For a theological
student in the early nineteen hundreds to be orthodox was
an anachronism. To be in the swim one had to be liberal.
The bright young men inevitably found their way on to the
band-wagon of liberalism. "I believe in the forgiveness of
sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting."
Of these words Niebuhr writes:

"These closing words of the Apostolic Creed, in which
the Christian hope of the fulfilment of life is expressed,
were, as I remember it, an offence and a stumbling-
block to young theologians at the time when my
generation graduated from theological seminaries.
Those of us who were expected to express our Christian
faith in terms of the Apostolic creed at the occasion of
our ordination had long and searching discussions on
the problem presented by the creed, particularly by the
last phrase. We were not certain that we could honestly
express our faith in such a formula. If we were finally pre-
vailed upon to do so, it was usually with a patronizing
air toward the Christian past, with which we desired
to express a sense of unity even if the price was the
suppression of our moral and theological scruples over
its inadequate rendering of the Christian faith. The
twenty years which divide that time from this have
brought great changes in theological thought though
I am not certain that many of my contemporaries are
not still of the same mind in which they were then.

element: it was a secular philosophy of man and history. "Modernism"
is misleading, since it conveys the impression that modern advances in
knowledge and science are objected to by its opponents^-which, of
course, is not the case. So in these pages, I shall stick to the terms "religi-
ous liberalism," or "Protestant liberalism," for the Roman Catholic
Church never dallied with the liberal movement in theology.

16 KEINHOLD NIEBUHR

Yet some of us have been persuaded to take the
stone which we then rejected and make it the head of
the corner. In other words, there is no part of the
Apostolic creed which, in our present opinion, ex-
presses the whole genius of the Christian faith more
nearly than just this despised phrase: 'I believe in the
resurrection of the body!' " (Beyond Tragedy, pp.
289-90.)

This 1 passage expresses well the theological temper of the
time in which Niebuhr was preparing for the ministry. It
is significant that his reaction to it should be, in the first
instance, not intellectual, but moral and psychological.
Already Niebuhr was beginning to feel faintly that the
predominating theological liberalism of his time was not
relevant to the concrete problems of life and daily experi-
ence. It did not fit into the context of the conflicting issues
of the American scene. This easy, optimistic gospel of
roaring, irresistible movement to Utopia was already
beginning to sound out of tune somehow in the youthful
student's ears.

Now this is a most remarkable, significant fact, the
importance of which the reader might easily miss. In
reacting in this way to the theological liberalism of his time,
Niebuhr was anticipating an entire process of historic
development. In the triumphant peak of social progress,
when the actual situation was so gloriously confirming faith
in collective omnipotence, when, as yet, it conveyed no hint
of the wrath to come, Niebuhr's ears caught the muffled
echoes of the distant very distant thunder. With most
Christian thinkers the situation is quite the reverse. They
only become aware of social tendencies as they are passing
away. They follow historic development a long way behind.
They recognize and condemn social evils only when even
the blind can no longer ignore them. There is nothing

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 17

particularly prophetic in such an attitude. But Niebuhr was
beginning to sense the coming storm and crisis of civiliza-
tion when the sky was still apparently cloudless. It was this
"sixth-sense" of his which was the source of his feeling that
so much of the theology he was imbibing in his college days
was irrelevant. His revolutionary spirit, therefore, was
native to him, fundamtenal and inherent in his make-up,
in his very being. It is necessary to emphasize this point. He
did not acquire it as the result of a rational process by the
study of some analytical sociology, such as Marxism. At
this time, 1910-1915, he had not yet read Marx nor made
contact with general Marxist literature. All this was to come
later. His sensing of the underlying tragic and corrupting
element in the social situation was the sign of his own
creative, prophetic mind. One cannot "explain" this, in the
sense of enumerating and analysing all the factors that
caused or determined it. One can but recognize it as some-
thing already in operation.

So with this irritating consciousness of the irrelevance of
much that he was perforce being compelled to learn, Nie-
buhr did not proceed to his doctor's degree, which meant
that he could not undertake a professorship. It, therefore,
had to be the parochial cure of souls.

In the German Evangelical Church individual congrega-
tions did not invite men; the practice was for the central
authority to place men in churches, a practice for which, in
retrospect, Niebuhr feels there is a great deal to be said. So
on leaving Yale after graduating M.A., Niebuhr was sent
to undertake the pastorate of Bethel Evangelical church in
Detroit in 1915. At that time it was but a small community
of only eighteen families. As subsequent events showed, it
was a good sphere in which to begin. The pastoral side of his
ministry did not make too great a tax on his intellectual and
spiritual resources, though he certainly felt the strain, both
intellectually and spiritually. For instance, after he had

1 8 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

preached about a dozen times, Niebuhr felt he had said all
he had to say. "Now that I have preached about a dozen
sermons, I find I am repeating myself. A different text
simply means a different pretext for saying the same thing
over again. The few ideas that I had worked into sermons at
the seminary have all been used, and now what?" (Leaves
from the Notebook ... p. 4.) Thus Niebuhr felt acutely the
need to read and study. His desire was painfully accentuated
by the necessities of his ministry. He was greatly handi-
capped by his inability to buy books: during the first five
years of his pastorate he bought hardly a single one. His
very small salary made it impossible. It was during these
years that he was so greatly preoccupied by the intellectual
aspect of theology, and so needed most to get books. Later
on, as the result of his pastoral work among the workers in
the Ford plant, and of his own social observation, the ethical
aspect of theological problems overshadowed the purely
rational aspect in his thinking. We find this entry in his
diary in 1920 after five years in the pastorate. "I am begin-
ning to like the ministry. I think since I have stopped worry-
ing so much about the intellectual problems of religion and
have begun to explore some of its ethical problems there is
more of a thrill in preaching. The real meaning of the
gospel is in conflict with most of the customs and attitudes
of our day at so many places that there is adventure in the
Christian message, even if you only play around with its
ideas in a conventional world" (op. cit., p. 27).

Another instance of the strain which Niebuhr felt in
these first five years arose from his acute personal shyness
and sensitiveness, which, however, contributed greatly to
his revolutionary development. It seems to be a law, both in
personal experience and in the wider social development of
civilization, that it is through the overcoming of what is
painful and difficult that the best insights and achievements
are realized. Dr. Niebuhr demonstrates this within the more

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 19

restricted range of the experience of the individual.
He found pastoral visitation, at first, to be most painful
and difficult. To visit people in their homes and talk
to them in terms of personal intimacy, which the pastoral
office necessitates if it is to be genuinely exercised, he felt
was something of an agony. He writes, "I am glad there are
only eighteen families in this church. I have been visiting
the members for six weeks, and haven't seen all of them yet.
Usually I walk past a house two or three times before I
summon the courage to go in. I am always very courteously
received, so I don't know exactly why I should not be able
to overcome this curious timidity" (op. cit. t p. 3). It was
precisely through his subsequent personal contacts with
Ford workers and others that Niebuhr came to comprehend
the profoundly tragic and contradictory character of human
nature as manifested in social and economic relationships.
In his first essays at personal contacts with the members of
his congregation he was laying the foundations of his pro-
found and sincere personal interest and concern with the
exploited classes of capitalist society. It is in this awareness
of the reality of the personal that Niebuhr so finely displays
the Christian revolutionary spirit. The defeat and tragedy of
the secular revolutionary is that the reality of the individual
as a person, an end in himself, is dissipated into mere social
forces and institutionalism. The individual as a soul, a
person, degenerates into a factor in the class or social
struggle, especially in the crisis of an actual revolutionary
situation. That is one reason why, in due course, the revolu-
tionary can, in his turn, oppress and exploit the very people
he set out to emancipate. This tendency to instrumentauze
living souls, to which both secular and Christian revolu-
tionaries are subject, was held in check in Niebuhr's case
by the costliness with which he had learnt to secure
personal" contacts and intimacy in the course of his
pastoral work. A reality acquired under so much stress

20 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

offered a tough resistance to the corrupting processes of
institutionalism.

The fact that Niebuhr increasingly tended to envisage
and formulate theological problems in the framework of
concrete personal relationships helps, perhaps, to explain
a rare quality in Niebuhr a quality, moreover, which
constituted an important element in his make-up as a
Christian revolutionary. This "quality was an acute and
constant awareness of the corrupting element in his own
profession of Christian minister, and in his own ideas and
interests. This capacity to see in oneself the tendency to self-
deception and humbugging is rare in any and every calling,
in the Christian ministry as in other professions: indeed, one
may say especially in the Christian ministry. This power of
"self-criticism," which later, in the Russian Communist
party, was to become a cant phrase, was to become one of
the major themes in Niebuhr's social analysis, and the one
on which he has written with most power and illumination.
We find almost at the beginning of his ministry that he was
becoming aware of how fatally the will-to-power and
egoistic compensation and satisfaction insinuated themselves
into the most exalted activities of the ministerial office.

"Beside the brutal facts of modern industrial life, how
futile are all our homiletical spoutings! The Church is
undoubtedly cultivating graces and preserving spiritual
amenities in the more protected areas of our society. But it
isn't changing the essential facts of modern industrial
civilization by a hair's breadth" (op. cit., p. 79). Here is an
instance of Niebuhr's refusal to close his eyes to fundamental
facts. In the next quotation he indicates the general clerical
reaction to this situation a reaction in which he sees his
own participation. He places himself on the same level as
those whom he blames. That is, he criticizes, but does not
judge. "But I must confess that I haven't discovered much
courage in the ministry. The average parson is characterized

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 21

by suavity and circumspection rather than by robust forti-
tude. I do not intend to be mean in my criticism, because I
am a coward myself and find it tremendously difficult to
run counter to general opinion" (op. cit., p. no). But he
goes deeper than this.

"One of the most fruitful sources of self-deception in
the ministry is the proclamation of great ideals and
principles without any clue to their relation .to the
controversial issues of the day. The minister feels very
heroic in uttering the ideals because he knows that some
rather dangerous immediate consequences are involved
in their application. But he doesn't make the applica-
tion clear, and those who hear his words are either
unable to see the immediate issue involved or they are
unconsciously grateful to the preacher for not belabour-
ing a contemporaneous issue which they know to be
involved but would rather not face. I have myself too
frequently avoided the specific application of general
principles to controversial situations to be able to deny
what really goes on in the mind of the preacher when
he is doing this. I don't think I have always avoided it,
and when I haven't I have invariable gotten into some
difficulty" (op. cit., pp. 191-2).

This passage illustrates, as does the whole book from
which it is quoted, how close Niebuhr keeps to concrete,
actual experience. And here, I think, is the explanation of
one of the great qualities of Niebuhr, namely, his relevance
to the whole contemporary situation of man in history. One
of his greatest achievements is that he has made theology
a science of secular urgency and significance. He is one of
the very few theologians to whom secular and humanist
thinkers pay attention, as much as they pay to their own
publicists. This is a most rare achievement, of which few
theologians can boast. In England, we can count them on

22 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

the fingers of one hand, of whom one would undoubtedly
be Mr. C. S. Lewis. Theology in the hands of the typical
theologians of all schools has somehow come to seem remote
from current issues and problems, an abstract, slightly
faddist, pursuit. But, as Niebuhr presents it, it becomes a
living, contemporary issue, more up-to-date than The
Times, and certainly less pompous. Most men write about
theology. But Niebuhr writes theology straight from the
furnace of social conflict and tragedy. Theology, to Niebuhr,
is no "ivory castle." It is thus because in his pastorate, his
one and only pastorate, he was all the time under the
pressure of hard, material realities; for an important factor
he lived for thirteen years in Detroit.

One of the greatest influences that went to the making of
a Christian revolutionary out of Niebuhr was Henry
Ford. Needless to say, Mr. Ford did not intend that, and, in
all probability, is blissfully unaware that he has done any
such thing. But this is in the fitness of Providence, which
has always displayed a profound ironical sense of humour.
Out of man's productive activity, Providence manufactures
a by-product. St. Paul, the missionary, was one of the
providential by-products of the Roman Empire. And
Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian revolutionary, was one
of the by-products of Mr. Henry Ford's motor manufacture.
At the same time as he was producing his tin-lizzies (which
at a later stage he made into ladies) Mr. Ford was also pro-
ducing at least one Christian revolutionary. Probably many
more. But we are sure that he produced one.

In 1915, the year in which Niebuhr began his work in the
ministry, his church had little more than forty members.
In 1928, when he became professor of applied Christian
ethics at Union Seminary, New York, he left behind him a

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 23

flourishing church of over 800 members. Niebuhr himself
is very modest about this magnificent achievement. He says
that any person, short of an utter incompetent, could have
built a church in those hectic years, during which the
population of Detroit increased from a hundred thousand
to nearly a million. Whilst we shall thoroughly disagree
with Niebuhr's own estimate of himself as a church-builder,
we must acknowledge that the great increase in Detroit's
population was a most favourable factor. It gave Niebuhr
the opportunity, which he so splendidly turned to
account.

The dominant factor in this great growth of population
was, of course, the great expansion in the Ford industries.
After Henry Ford's romantic attempt with the ridiculous
"peace ship" to end European hostilities in the war of
1914-18, and when America entered the war in 1917, Ford
settled down to organize gigantic production for the Ameri-
can and associated armies. This meant a greatly extended
plant and a vast increase in labour-power. This was the
source of the increase of Detroit's population, which had to
be catered for religiously as well as secularly. Niebuhr
attracted both young and old to his church, and to some
extent the age distinction coincided with the political com-
plexion of his congregation. The younger people in the
congregation tended to be "radical," in the American sense
of the word, i.e., left-wing, progressive and liberal. The
older people tended to be more conservative. Thus
Niebuhr's congregation was nicely balanced, which partly
accounts for the comparatively little trouble which he
experienced as a result of his preaching and teaching.
Niebuhr not only enunciated principles to which, as he
says, nobody objects, he also indicated applications of those
principles to current social issues, to which many people
object. Niebuhr of course did not escape altogether. How
could he? But the presence in his congregation of numerous

24 REINHOLD NIEBUH&

radical-thinking young people kept the trouble within
bounds.

It was through his contact with the Ford workers, both
inside his church and outside, that Niebuhr's attitude to
social problems took shape; for he had opportunity to
observe in the lives of people the inhuman effects of Ford's
spurious idealism. And it taught him one thing in particular:
the penetration of idealism by the corrupting element of
self-interest; the inevitability of self-deception in the best
intentions; the underlying cruelty and brutality in every
class culture. He learnt this as a fact of living, sensitive,
human suffering.' On the one hand were the loudly-
trumpeted Ford principles of industrial organization in
capitalist press and speeches throughout the world. On the
other hand Niebuhr saw the results of those same principles
at work in the daily life of men, women and children. So he
learnt that social idealism could never be taken at face-
value. He learnt that, not as an abstract principle, but as a
pathological human process, as something that made men
anxious and women fearful. There was in Niebuhr's social
observation a profound prophetic quality, by means of
which he was enabled to feel the struggle and suffering of
people as a personal thing. He combined with the exactitude,
the fact-finding mind of the social scientist, the passionate
spirit and the religious insight of the prophet. Which serves
to describe the Christian revolutionary, who is a synthesis
of social scientist and religious prophet, of historic realism
and super-historic revelation. It may be useful to give a few
instances of Niebuhr's reactions to the Ford environment in
Detroit.

At the close of the last war, from 1920 till about 1928,
America experienced a phase of material progress and pros-
perity. Every class in society enjoyed a relatively high
standard of living. Money was abundant, and commodities
hitherto regarded as luxuries of the privileged few entered

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 25

into common use. Radios, automobiles and refrigerators
became a general possession. To be without these was a sign
of poverty. People of small incomes were enabled to
negotiate the high prices of these and similar commodities
by a fantastic development of the hire-purchase system. At
one bound, America had entered into Eldorado. Was it not
the land in which every working-man went to his work in
his own motor-car? It is difficult in our present situation to
recapture the atmosphere of untroubled optimism and
irresponsible confidence that prevailed in that cloud-cuckoo
land which America was in that boom period. At long last,
the problem of poverty had been solved. The apologists for
American capitalism laughed at the jeremiads of Marx and
all the other prophets of gloom. Capitalism was functioning
beautifully. At one and the same time it milled out ex-
travagant profits to the capitalist at one end, and abundant
wages to the proletariat at the other. High wages became
a capitalist argument. The solemn economic experts were
taken in. The Marxist analysis of surplus value was jeered
at. "The fundamental business of the country," said Presi-
dent Hoover, "is on a sound and prosperous basis."

Now the leader of the hosts which had planted the New
Jerusalem in America's vast and varied land was Henry
Ford, to whom "history is bunk'." He claimed specifically
three things: that he served the public by providing it with
a good, cheap car; that he paid his workers high wages, a
minimum of five dollars a day; that he secured them an
ample leisure by instituting the five-day week. The world
gaped in admiration at the Ford miracle. Reinhold Niebuhr,
being on the spot and being in personal touch with the men
for whom these wonderful things were being done, reacted
differently.

Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, after a visit which he paid to the
Ford works, said that it was the nearest thing to hell he had
ever seen. That was the aspect of it which impinged on

26 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Niebuhr. All this triumph of organization, with its efficient
service and its alleged benefits to the worker, was a vast
mechanism which dehumanized and depersonalized the
worker at the same time. It was all built up on the principle
of a scientific reduction of physical movement to a mini-
mum and of adapting the worker, the human agent, to the
remorseless continuity of the machine. It was the worker,
enslaved by the conveyor belt, who paid the price for this
in nervous tension. Not Ford himself; nor the new technic-
ians of labour-processes with their soulless research into
the behaviour of human beings in the factory; nor the
public, who little realized that the gallivanting jaunts which
their tin-lizzie made possible were the result of the torn
nerves of living men. Material progress might demand too
great a price in human consciousness. "We went through
one of the big automobile factories to-day. . . . The foundry
interested me particularly. The heat was terrific. The men
seemed weary. Here manual labour is a drudgery and toil
is slavery. The men cannot possibly find any satisfaction in
their work. They simply work to make a living. Their
sweat and their dull pain are part of the price paid for the
fine cars we all run. And most of us run the cars without
knowing what price is being paid for them. . . . We are all
responsible. We all want the things which the factory pro-
duces and none of us is sensitive enough to care how much
in human values the efficiency of the modern factory costs"
(op. cit., pp. 79-80). "The culture of every society seeks to
obscure the brutalities on which it rests." In Niebuhr's
vision the brutalities loomed larger than the loudly trum-
peted progress and achievements. This vision made of him
a permanent, penetrating critic of the entire social structure.
He would concede the first of Ford's claims, namely that
he provided the public with a good, cheap car. But over
against that fact, Niebuhr was oppressed by the human
misery it cost.

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 27

Ford's second claim, that he paid high wages to his
workers, especially that the minimum was five dollars a day,
probably did as much as anything to push Niebuhr in a
revolutionary direction. Factually and literally, of course,
the claim could not be challenged. Even the floor-sweeper
did get his five dollars for every day that he worked. But the
implications were specious and misleading. The general
assumption was that five dollars a day meant thirty dollars
a week, fifteen hundred dollars a year of fifty weeks. The
doorkeepers in Fords' factories were in receipt of the
sumptuous salary of ^300 a year. That was the general
belief. But it didn't work out that way. Not by a long
chalk. Hardly a single one of Ford's vast army of workers
ever managed to work six days a week, fifty weeks a year.
The reality, therefore, behind the splendid facade of "five
dollars- a day" was for great numbers a squalid poverty,
which at times and for certain periods was grim and acute.
The five dollars per day, by the end of the year, amounted
to far less than fifteen hundred. I cannot pretend to give
exact figures. But of the general fact, there could be no
doubt: that owing to the number of days in the course of
a year that they did not work, masses of Ford's workers in
Detroit struggled along in acute poverty.

"What a civilization this is! Naive gentlemen with a
genius for mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the
lives and fortunes of hundreds and thousands. Their moral
pretensions are credulously accepted at full value. No one
bothers to ask whether an industry which can maintain a
cash reserve of a quarter of a billion ought not make
some provision for its unemployed. . . . The cry of the
hungry is drowned in the song, 'Henry has made a lady out
of Lizzy' " (op. cit., pp. 154-5).

The third of Mr. Ford's claims was the most pretentious
of all. Again, in the bare literal sense, it is quite true that in
the course of a week his factory worked less hours for the

28 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

same pay but at a much greater cost. He instituted the
five-day week on the iniquitous speed-up principle. And if
I may use a colloquialism, this is what got Niebuhr's goat.
Ford's labour engineers worked out a greater speed-up and
concentration of physical processes in the factory, by means
of which the workers were compelled to effect a greater
production in jive days than in the previous six. So the Ford
works switched over to five days a week, as a result of
which there was a slight increase in production, and a slight
decrease in financial cost, but a greater expenditure of
nervous energy and nervous wear and tear. The cheapening
of the economic cost of production of the Ford car resulted
inevitably in the cheapening also of the personality of the
producer.

Every one of Ford's supposed benefits for the workers
was of still greater benefit to Henry Ford which rather
takes the gilt off the gingerbread. In every case, it was the
public that stumped up the cash, and the workers themselves
who paid in additional nervous wear and tear. It was
"enlightened self-interest" with a vengeance.

Thus the thirteen years Niebuhr lived in Detroit were
spent in seeing the moral and social consequences and
implications of brutal economic facts. It was a discipline
which made him a revolutionary; for he revolted against it
with his whole soul. It made of him a Christian revolution-
ary, since his revolt was determined by the vision of man as
free personality, as one meant to be son of God. It is signifi-
ant and fitting that this should have happened in Detroit.
Henry Ford was the personal symbol of machine-power,
mass-production etc., his vision was one of "machines to
make more machines." Reinhold Niebuhr was a symbol
too, a symbol of the response of the Christian gospel to this
latest and greatest peril to the soul of man.

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 29

During these thirteen years of intense activity in Detroit,
Niebuhr became known nationally as a thorough-going
"radical" a term which connoted everything opprobrious.
In no country did the bolshevik bogey exercise a more
searing influence among the middle classes than in the
United States throughout the immediate post-war years.
The country was swept by an unreasoning torrent of panic,
when socialists, communists and liberals (lumped together
as "radicals"), were savagely persecuted. It was, therefore,
a very difficult and dangerous time in which to evince social
sympathies. It speaks volumes for the personality and
character of Niebuhr that, through all this panic, his
influence continued to grow. He did not trim his revolu-
tionary sails to the winds of reaction.

As well as being in daily personal and pastoral contact
with the members of his congregation, Niebuhr was also
closely associated with labour and socialist organizations
outside his church, a fact which constituted an excellent
dialectical discipline. In this way he was compelled to relate
his Christianity to a concrete human situation, and to relate
social problems to Christian theology. This as much as
anything was what moulded him into a Christian revolu-
tionary, since his relation to non-church socialist groups
made him familiar with non-christian revolutionary ideas
and literature. The artificiality and secular ignorance of so
many men in the ministry of all denominations is due to
their restriction to professional church life. Their whole life
almost is spent among church circles. Their reading is
confined to professional theology, with the result that
their knowledge of the world is refracted through a prism
of religiosity. This breeds a certain pious unreality. Religious
authorities might do worse than to make it compulsory for
Christian ministers, during the first ten years of their

30 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

ministry, to belong to some purely secular organizations.
This was Niebuhr's practice throughout his entire ministry.
His association with outside labour and socialist groups has
continued to this day.

It is important to observe that his socialist activities have
not been carried on at the expense of his Christian activities.
It happens only too often that Christian ministers who are
active socialists come to be thought of in the public mind as
being socialists first and only secondly Christian. Their
Christianity has become subordinate to their socialism. The
public impression is that Christianity is definable in terms of
socialism. There can be no doubt that this impression is
frequently unjust. But neither can there be any doubt that
it is frequently just. In the minds of many ardent clerical
socialists, Christianity is equated to and identified with
socialism. When that happens, then, notwithstanding pro-
testations to the contrary, Christianity does fall into second
place. This has never happened with Reinhold Niebuhr.
His Christianity is so obviously primary and fundamental
that even the most prejudiced and fearful have never thought
of him as anything but Christian.

To what extent his economic and political reading con-
tributed to his development as a Christian revolutionary
one cannot speak with any confidence. That it informed his
mind is, of course, obvious. Nobody can read Niebuhr
without being impressed with the range and accuracy of his
knowledge of economic and political theory and history.
But did any of this make him a Christian revolutionary?
This raises the question of what it is which makes men
revolutionary or prophetic. And this is but a variant of the
old, old question which has never yet been satisfactorily
answered What makes genius? Who can tell? Where or
how did Beethoven get his creative power? What was it in
Jeremiah that singled him out for his profound prophetic
role? How can we account for the fact that the bourgeois

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 31

Marx became a revolutionary creator? Or Lenin? If one
could answer these questions one might be able to attempt
to define the factor which was decisive in making a Christian
revolutionary out of Niebuhr. Men are geniuses and pro-
phets in virtue of some mysterious, inner endowment.
Genius and prophecy are inexplicable in terms of mere
environment. Environment may modify or influence or
mould but not make a genius or a prophet or a revolutionary
in the profound sense. Men are born so or not. The creative
pioneer is what he is in virtue of himself. His environment
is not decisive for him. For talent, yes; for genius or
prophecy, no.

So in all probability the truth about Niebuhr, the Chris-
tian revolutionary, is that he was born with a mysterious
potentiality, which became conscious through his Detroit
experience. His reading and study, whilst of great signifi-
ance, were really secondary. He read Marx and Engels, for
instance, because he already was revolutionary in himself.
The distinctive thing about Niebuhr is not his knowledge,
though it is great and unusual. What distinguishes him is
his profound insight. And that does not come from mere
reading or study, else every M.A. or D.D. would be
bristling with prophecy. But they are not. Many of them
are deadly dull and blind as bats. We cannot do better than
accept the fact that Niebuhr is what he is a Christian
revolutionary and simply note how he has developed and
what his activities have been.

In 1928, Niebuhr accepted the invitation to the chair of
applied Christian ethics in Union Theological Seminary,
New York which he still occupies with great distinction.
It is no exaggeration to say that to-day he is a world figure,
which is fully attested by two facts. First, that he was invited

32 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

to deliver the GifFord lectures for 1939-40; and second, that
Oxford University bestowed on him its degree of doctor of
divinity in June, 1943. Only three other Americans have
had the honour of being Gifford lecturers, William James,
Josiah Royce and John Dewey. And it is well known how
jealously Oxford guards its D.D. degree: it bestows it only
when it can no longer withhold it which is an excellent
rule for any university in granting its degrees. Niebuhr's
Oxford degree is the symbol of his position and influence.

One of his greatest achievements is that he has invested
theology with relevance and significance for the contem-
porary secular mind, a fact which may be illustrated thus.
During his visit to England in 1943, he met Kingsley Martin,
editor of the New Statesman and Nation, and J. B. Priestley.
Niebuhr began to talk politics and sociology, but both
Mr. Kingsley Martin and Mr. Priestley said that they had
wanted to meet him, not to talk politics, but to discuss
religion and theology. Mr. Priestley I do not know. But
Mr. Kingsley Martin I do know, and I cannot imagine more
than two professional theologians whom he would wish to
meet for the purpose of discussing religion. Which demon-
strates Niebuhr's power to pierce the thickest secular hide.
There is no theologian to whom the secular "progressives,"
either here or in America, listen with greater attention than
to Reinhold Niebuhr. Such is the position which he has
won by long years of activity both as a Christian thinker
and as a radical politician.

Since this book is not a study in biography I cannot
attempt to tell the story of Niebuhr s activity since he
became professor in 1928. It has been prodigious, both in
radical politics and in Christian theology. But this brief
sketch would be incomplete without some account of his
work for the Fellowship of Socialist Christians in America.

It was founded in 1936 by a group of radical Christians , of
whom Niebuhr was one, with the object of correlating

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY 33

Christianity and social reconstruction. Its membership is
still small and represents but a very tiny minority of Ameri-
can churchmen. But its numbers bear no relation whatever
to the value of its work and witness. In its ranks are some of
the ablest Christian thinkers of America. Its best work is
done by means of its quarterly journal, which was first
published under the title Radical Religion, later changed to
Christianity and Society, under which it continues to appear.
It cannot be said to flourish financially; such serious journals
never do. But it certainly does flourish intellectually. In its
pages is to be found the profoundest thinking about the
problem of the relations of Christianity to society.

Niebuhr himself edits it, and writes a goodly portion of
it quarter by quarter. Its outstanding feature is, in fact, the
editorials on current public questions. It is not too much to
say that there is nothing like these contributions of Niebuhr's
in contemporary journalism, most certainly not in con-
temporary Christian journalism. With very few exceptions,
commentary on public events in the religious press is but an
echo of that in the secular press. One looks in vain for inter-
pretation and commentary distinctively Christian. This is
what Niebuhr almost alone does. His editorials are, needless
to say, always well-informed. But more important than the
reliability and fullness of their information is their profound
insight. Niebhur does two things. First, he applies Christian
theology as a dominating principle of social criticism, and,
second, seeks to indicate the line of Christian action in any
given situation. He thus redeems theology from the charge
of being remote and abstract. In his hands, theology is
endowed with profound social implications. He supplies it
with a razor edge, which cuts into the pious complacencies
of bourgeois religion, and into the equally pious com-
placencies and deep-seated illusions of bourgeois politics,
both capitalist and socialist.

Niebuhr is himself an example of the paradox of Christian

34 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

faith; for the disturbing feature of the Christian revolution-
ary is the combination of orthodox theology with radical
politics. Right-wing in religion, he is left-wing in politics.
Niebuhr has helped to kill the idea that theological ortho-
doxy is necessarily reactionary in social tendency. He has
recalled it from a false and deadly association. Religious
orthodoxy has for long been synonymous with dullness,
unadventurousness, "safety" and privilege. Here in Eng-
land, orthodoxy in religion has too often been wedded with
Conservatism and a still more reactionary Liberalism. The
phrase "high-church toryism" is an indication, and low-
church toryism is another indication of the same thing.
Socialists among Anglican evangelicals, for example, are
very rare. Niebuhr has done much to poleaxe that attitude.
Theological orthodoxy has profound revolutionary im-
plications for society. One of the earliest revolts in Niebuhr's
mind was the revolt against left-wing, progressive, advanced
theology. His first movement was a movement to the right.

2

Movement to the Right

ONE of the most remarkable features of contemporary
intellectual life both in England and the United States
has been the tendency of the most penetrating social critics
of our civilization to move from a left position in theology
to the right, from liberalism to orthodoxy. Outstanding
examples in England are Father Vidler and Canon Demant;
continental examples are Karl Barth and Nicholas Berdyaev.
The outstanding American example is Reinhold Niebuhr.
Among Christian theologians, the profounder the thought,
the more thorough-going is the movement away from
liberalism to orthodoxy. The same tendency, in a different
form, is observable among non-christian thinkers. In their
case, it is a movement from secular rationalism towards a
religious hypothesis; an instance is Mr. Aldous Huxley.
Christian liberalism was partly the expression and partly the
creator of the simple delusion that it is within the power of
human nature to create Utopia; that men, in fact, could be
made Christian by act of parliament and other institutional,
social action. The tendency, therefore, was for liberals in
theology to become socialists in politics, with the idea that
by implementing a socialist programme society would be
made Christian. That is to say, socialism was the practical
embodiment of a theoretical Christianity.

Now when events .began to reveal the hollo wness of this
too rosy assumption; when it came to be seen that social
and technical progress was accompanied by a most dis-
tressing development of hitherto unsuspected evils, there
emerged the beginnings of a new scepticism about the
capacity of human nature, which was stimulated by the new
psychologies of the unconscious. It was this scepticism that

36 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

proved to be the point of departure in a new theological
development towards the right, a reaction, in fact, in the
proper meaning of the word. The dawning suspicion that
technical progress might not, after all, prove to be a straight
road to Utopia was the terminus a quo for a profound and
widespread revolt against the whole attitude of Christian,
or Protestant, liberalism and for a return to orthodoxy,
especially to orthodox doctrine of sin. The hinge on which
this whole movement turned was in Niebuhr's case the
Reformation doctrine of justification by faith, which may
truthfully be described as the "bovrilization" of the whole
scheme of Christian sociology. It is the formulation in
theological terms of man's social, secular development. One
of the most considerable services of Niebuhr to contempor-
ary Christian thinking has been the investing of theology,
and more particularly this doctrine of justification by faith,
with secular urgency. In the struggle for the correct appre-
ciation of this dogma, Niebuhr has not spent his energies
on remote, abstract, ghostly issues which move only in a
transcendent realm, but on issues which, though trans-
cendent, also fatally affect the historically decisive problems
of power, progress and social justice.

At this point it is necessary to draw the reader's attention
to a most significant feature in Niebuhr's development as a
Christian revolutionary. It is this: in the movement away
from liberal theology Niebuhr did not at the same time
jettison the social criticism associated with the theology he
was abandoning; he did not throw away the baby with the
bath-water. Indeed, the more right he t became in theology,
the more left he tended to become in politics. What was
really happening was that his social criticism was becoming
deeper, more penetrating: it was turning into a criticism of
the ordinary left social criticism. He became acutely aware
of the fact that the political left shared the fundamental
illusions of the political right. His social criticism thus took

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 37

on a deeper hue. It acquired a new motivation, a new
dimension of perspective, which, in time, led him to a
distinctive Christian idea, which I may define as the theory
of the historically permanent revolution which will
occupy us in the final chapter.

In this double development, Niebuhr was displaying an
essential characteristic of Christian thinking. He was, in
other words, preserving the permanent essence of a tempor-
ary phase of development. In abandoning the old, outworn
idea he nevertheless preserved the effect on his mentality
and attitude of having undergone the process of thinking
the old idea. A very important point, and a comparatively
rare accomplishment. That is why so many rebels of twenty-
one become tories at fifty or sixty. It is because of their
inability to preserve the ethos, the atmosphere of the idea
when, at last, they abandon the idea itself. They become as
though they had never thought an earlier phase at all
which is disintegration at its worst. It is almost inevitable,
if a man grows at, all, that he should outgrow the left illu-
sions of his rebellious youth, though many of the typical
secular left never do: in their old age they are still milling
out the ideas and illusions of their callow youth. In a pro-
found sense the whole secular left, with its tendency to
totalitarianism, is a case of arrested development, not a
second childhood but the perpetuation of the first childhood.
Niebuhr has escaped this pern of arrested development, and
also the peril of a supine drift into "traditionalism," in other
words, of becoming a tory at fifty-four. From his contin-
uous spiritual and intellectual growth he extracts the historic
essence of the ideas which he no longer can accept as valid.
Thus, at the pending transition from youth to age, he is a
responsible revolutionary, in whom tradition and progress
organically interpenetrate. This achievement has its root
in his appropriation of the supreme contribution of the
Protestant reformers -justification by faith.

38 REINHOLD NIEBHUR

From the stubborn and baffling contradiction of human
experience and history it was perhaps inevitable that
Niebuhr should turn to the Reformation doctrine. Inherit-
ing as he did through his family history the traditions of the
Reformation, it was not an accident that he should find the
key to the perplexities and problems, which his daily
experience and thinking imposed upon him, in the con-
fession of his church. The point here is that it was his social
passion that dictated his theological development. His
theology took shape under the pressure of social and
economic issues. He did not become a theologian through
the study of systematic theology as an insulated, isolated
activity. He acquired his theology piece by piece, so to
speak, as social issues awoke in his mind the need for
fundamental foothold. Niebuhr's theological development
began in his attempt to find some satisfactory answer to the
abysmal problems of human nature. And of all the great
Christian dogmas, justification by faith is the one most
directed to human nature. In this dogma he the seeds of every
other great Christian doctrine. It implies a whole system of
theology. In it, potentially, are also the doctrines of sin and
forgiveness, of providence and judgement, of divine crea-
tion and human freedom, all of which Niebuhr personally
came to realize under the pressure of a growing social
problem. He made the paradoxical discovery that the firmest
foundation for radical politics was a conservative theology,
that tradition was the surest safeguard of rational progress.

One of the first problems to oppress him was the terrible
contrast between "moral man and immoral society,"
between the relatively decent, good behaviour of man as an
individual, and man as a society, man in the mass. It was
a problem which defined a problem. The fact of the contrast
revealed to Niebuhr what he came to regard as the basic

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 39

problem of human nature in historical development. His
analysis of this contrast led him to the roots of the contra-
diction of human nature.

"Individual men may be moral in the sense that they
are able to consider interests other than their own in
determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on
occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to
their own. They are endowed by nature with a measure
of sympathy and consideration for their kind, the breadth
of which may be extended by an astute social pedagogy.
Their rational faculty prompts them to a sense of justice
which educational discipline may refine and purge of
egoistic elements until they are able to view a social
situation, in which their own interests are involved,
with a fair measure of objectivity. But all these achieve-
ments are more difficult, if not impossible, for human
societies and social groups. In every human group
there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less
capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to compre-
hend the need of others and therefore more unrestrained
egoism than the individuals, who compose the groups,
reveal in their personal relationships" (Moral Man and
Immoral Society, pp. xi-xii. Hereinafter referred to as
M.M.).

In these words, Niebuhr states the fact of the morality of
man the individual, and the immorality of man the collec-
tive, and in seeking to formulate and to solve this problem,
he felt compelled to reject the too shallow assumptions
about the power of reason to affect the force of egoism.

"In analysing the limits of reason in morality it is
important to begin by recognizing 'that the force of
egoistic impulse is much more powerful than any but
the most astute psychological analysts and the most
rigorous devotees of introspection realize. If it is

40 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

defeated on a lower or more obvious level, it will
express itself in more subtle forms. If it is defeated by
social impulse it insinuates itself into the social impulse,
so that a man's devotion to his community always
means the expression of a transferred egoism as well as
of altruism. Reason may check egoism in order to fit
it harmoniously into a total body of social impulse.
But the same force of reason is bound to justify the
egoism of the individual as a legitimate element in that
total body of vital capacities, which society seeks to
harmonize" (op. cit., pp. 40-41).

Reason, in other words, becomes unconsciously the
instrument of egoism. It becomes the agent of egoism under
the impression that it is transcending it. There is the prob-
lem. It is this fatal, fundamental incapacity of reason which
embodies itself in imperialism, in inflated materialism, in
class exploitation, and also in proletarian resistance and in
socialist power.

In this double power of reason, in its capacity to do
opposite, contradictory things at the same time, Niebuhr
discovered the clue to the problem of human nature. It lay
in the fact that man existed in two dimensions of being. At
one and the same time man was under the dominion of
nature and also transcended nature. He was both in the
realm of necessity and in the realm of freedom. He was both
animal and spirit.

"The obvious fact is that man is child of nature, subject
to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven
by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the
years which nature permits its varied organic forms,
allowing them some, but not too much latitude. The
other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands
outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world.
This latter fact is appreciated in one or the other of its

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 41

aspects by various philosophies. But it is not frequently
appreciated in its total import. That man stands outside
of nature in some sense is admitted even by naturalists
who are intent upon keeping him as close to nature as
possible. They must at least admit that he is homofaber,
a tool-making animal. That man stands outside the
world is admitted by naturalists who, with Aristotle,
define man as a rational animal and interpret reason as
the capacity for making general concepts. But the
naturalists do not always understand that man's natural
capacity involves a further ability to stand outside
himself, a capacity for self-transcendence, the ability
to make himself his own object, a quality of spirit
which is usually not fully comprehended or connoted
in ratio or nous or "reason" or any of the concepts
which philosophers usually use to describe the unique-
ness of man" (The Nature and Destiny of Man.
Vol. I, pp. 3-4. Hereinafter referred to as Gifford
Lectures).

This analysis of the constitution of human nature in
history is fundamental in Niebuhr's thought, since it
involves for him the entire scheme ,of Christian orthodoxy.
This two-dimensional existence of necessity and freedom,
of nature and spirit, with its inevitable tension the one
dimension pulling one way and the other another way
constituted the environment for sin, on which the whole
issue of man's historic existence turns.

"In short, man, being both free and bound, both
limited and limitless, is anxious. Anxiety is the inevit-
able concomitant of the paradox of freedom and
finiteness in which man is involved. Anxiety is the
internal pre-condition of sin. It is the inevitable
spiritual state of man, standing in the paradoxical
situation of freedom and finiteness. Anxiety is the

42 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

f

internal description of the state of temptation. It must
not be identified with sin, because there is always the
ideal possibility that faith would purge anxiety of the
tendency towards sinful self-assertion. The ideal pos-
sibility is that faith in the ultimate security of God's
love would overcome all immediate insecurities of
nature and history. That is why Christian orthodoxy
has consistently defined unbelief as the root of sin, or
as the sin which precedes pride. . . . The freedom from
anxiety which He [Christ] enjoins is a possibility only
if perfect trust in divine security has been achieved.
Whether such freedom from anxiety and such perfect
trust are actual possibilities of historic exsitence must
be considered later. For the present it is enough to
observe that no life, even the most saintly, perfectly
conforms to the injunction not to be anxious. . . . Yet
anxiety is not sin. It must be distinguished from sin
partly because it is its pre-condition and not its actual-
ity, and partly because it is the basis of all human
creativity as well as the pre-condition of sin. Man is
anxious not only because his life is limited and
dependent and yet not so limited that he does not know
of his limitations. He is also anxious because he does
not know the limits of his possibilities. He can do
nothing and regard it perfectly done, because higher
possibilities are revealed in each achievement. All
human actions stand under seemingly limitless pos-
sibilities. There are, of course, limits but it is difficult
to gauge them from any immediate perspective. There
is therefore no limit of achievement in any sphere of
activity in which human history can rest with equa-
nimity" (Gifford Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 194-6).

In this state of anxiety, sin becomes a possibility, and the
whole point about historic existence is that the possibility

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 43

of sin has been actualized. Man is a sinner, which defines the
contradiction of human nature and its prolonged and in-
volved consequences in history. Niebuhr, more than any
contemporary Christian theologian, has rehabilitated the
Christian dogma of original sin in present day thinking.
He has done more than anyone of whom I have knowledge
to rescue it from the neglect and contempt of a mere secular
science and philosophy. He has done this, primarily, by
revealing its profound significance for sociology and the
philosophy of history. Having seen the secret of the con-
stitution of human nature in its two-fold dimensionalism,
he came to see social development as the expression, the
working-out, of the radical tension of man's being as sin.
Hence he looked upon the dogma of original sin as funda-
mental in Christian theology and as absolutely necessary for
the interpretation of the riddle of man's history. Once he
saw the profound significance of the dogma, he also came
to see the absurdity of its denial by liberal theology. " 'If
we can't find the real cause of social injustice,' said a typical
modern recently, 'we would be forced to go back to the
absurd doctrine of original sin.' That remark is a revelation
of the scientific 'objectivity' of modernity. The Christian
idea of original sin is ruled out a priori. This is understandable
enough in a non-christian world. What is absurd is that
modern Christianity should have accepted this modern
rejection of the doctrine of original sin with such pathetic
eagerness and should have spent so much energy in seeking
to prove that a Christian can be just as respectable and
modern as a secularist" (Christianity and Power Politics,
pp. 36-7). In rejecting original sin, liberalism was, in effect,
suppressing God's Good News to man.

Niebuhr realized that sin was the unique product of
man, the distinctive characteristic of self-consciousness. It
was not the survival of man's animal heritage. Sin
only becomes possible on the level of spirit. This

44 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

discovery exposed the hollowness of the liberal vision of
historic progress.

"In place of it [the Genesis account of the origin of
evil] we have substituted various accounts of the origin
and the nature of evil in human life. Most of these
accounts, reduced to their essentials, attribute sin to the
inertia of nature, or the hypertrophy of impulses, or to
the defect of reason (ignorance), and thereby either
explicitly or implicitly place their trust in developed
reason as the guarantee of goodness. In all of these
accounts the essential point in the nature of human evil
is incised, namely, that it arises from the very freedom
of reason with which man is endowed. Sin is not so
much a consequence of natural impulses, which in
animal life do not lead to sin, as of the freedom by
which man is able to throw the harmonies of nature out
of joint. He disturbs the harmony of nature when he
centres his life about one particular impulse (sex or the
possessive impulse, for instance) or when he tries to
make himself, rather than God, the centre of existence.
This egoism is sin in its quintessential form. It is not a
defect of nature, but a defect which becomes possible
because man has been endowed with a freedom not
known in the rest of Creation" (Beyond Tragedy,
pp. 10-11).

Niebuhr's emphasis upon the fact of sin and his analysis
of its essential character is a decisive demonstration of the
relation between his theology and his social radicalism, of
the fortifying of the Christian revolutionary by traditional
doctrine. It illustrates how his temperamental tendency to
social revolution is sustained by orthodox dogma; how, in
fact, he was driven to orthodox theology for the security
of his revolutionary impulse, so as to establish it on an
immovable foundation. I will give one more extract from

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 45

Niebuhr's work which seems to me to prove this process
beyond doubt.

"The truth is that, absurd as the classical Pauline
doctrine of original sin may seem to be at first blush,
its prestige as a part of the Christian truth is preserved,
and perennially re-established, against the attacks of
rationalists and simple moralists by its ability to throw
light upon complex factors in human behaviour which
constantly escape the moralists [My italics, D. R. D.]. It
may be valuable to use a simple example of contem-
porary history to prove the point. Modern religious
nationalism is obviously a highly explicit expression of
the collective pride in which all human behaviour is
involved and which Christian faith regards as the
quintessence of sin. In so far as this pride issues in specific
acts of cruelty, such as the persecution of the Jews, these
acts obviously cannot be defined as riroceeding from a
deliberate and malicious preference for evil in defiance
of the good. It is true of course that a modern devotee
of the religions of race and nation regards his nation as
the final good more deliberately than a primitive
tribalist, who merely assumed that his collective life
was the end of existence. Yet it would be fallacious to
assume that a nazi gives unqualified devotion to the
qualified and continued value of his race and nation
by a consciously perverse choice of the lesser against
the higher good. But it would be equally erroneous to
absolve the religious nationalist of responsibility merely
because his choice is not consciously perverse" (Gifford
Lectures, Vol. I, p. 264).

In his endeavour to understand the social problem and,
consequently, to pursue action about it more effectively, we
see that Niebuhr was compelled to become a theologian.
From his analysis of human nature he proceeded to the fact

46 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

of sin, more particularly original sin, which afforded him
insights into the social situation that inevitably lead him still
further to the right theologically. Reflection on this total
fact of sin illumined for him the meaning and inner sig-
nificance of another stubborn, tragic fact the fact of
revolutionary frustration, which may be expressed in two
ways. First, that social change never realizes the aims and
intentions of its advocates, that, in fact, it frequently results
in the opposite. Second, that social change, when the new
situation has crystallized and settled, frequently gives rise
to other objects which side-track and overlay the original
aims. This always happens both on the big historic scale, in
mass revolutionary movements, and in the smaller collective
conflicts of groups, parties and movements. Original sin
gave Niebuhr the clue to the correct interpretation of this
persistent phenomenon, so calamitous in its results. The
understanding of this, in turn, did something of incalculable
importance for Niebuhr the revolutionary. It delivered him
from undue illusions about the process of social development.
The significance of this fact for Niebuhr's development
cannot be exaggerated.

He defined sin, as we have seen, as centralization of the
ego. The generic term in which this whole process is
summed up is pride. Anxiety is the soil in which it grows.
Lack of trust in God leads to the desire to assume control of
one's own being and that is affirmation of self as central
and dominant. This pride then operates as a continuously
corrupting element in every human situation, but more
especially in collective, institutional development. Whilst in
the new social forms, the institutional evils of the displaced
social order are destroyed, the corrupting element of sin in the
human beings in the new order continues to bedevil all social
relationships, and consequently tends to frustrate revolu-
tionary hopes and aspirations. This is one of the most constant
and basic themes in all Niebuhr's writing and thinking.

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 47

"They [Marxists] imagine that social peace will result
from the victory of one class over all other classes. They
have not taken into account that modern capitalism
produces a formidable middle class the interests of
which are not identical with the proletarians. Moral
and spiritual considerations may conceivably prompt
this class to make common cause with the workers in
the attainment of ethical social ends, but it will never
be annihilated even by the most ruthless class conflict
nor will it be persuaded by the logic of economic facts
that its interests are altogether identical with those of
the workers. Even if one class were able to eliminate
all other classes, which is hardly probable, it would
require some social grace and moral dynamic to pre-
serve harmony between the various national groups by
which this vast 'mass would be organized and into
which it would disintegrate. Even within one national
unit any economic class will dissolve into various
groups, according to varying and sometimes conflicting
interests as soon as its foes are eliminated. The Russian
communists were not long able to preserve their
absolute solidarity after their revolution was firmly
established" (Does Civilization Need Religion? pp.
146-7).

This frustration of the social process by the corrupting
element of sin inevitably posed the problem of whether
frustration also meant futility. If human hope and aspiration
are constantly subject to a process of frustration, isn't history-
reduced to futility? Isn't the Golden City of man's dream
in that case a mirage? If all that the social process does is to
create new forms of injustice, what can be the point of it all?
Inspiration to pursue the goal is dependent upon illusion,
upon ignorance or unawareness of the character of human
nature. When illusion is dissipated, when at last there comes

48 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

realization of the corrupting element at work in man and
his institutions, and the consequent impotence of the human
will, inspiration surely dries up, and there follows a paralysis
of the will-to-struggle.

That conclusion is inevitable if time and history con-
stitute the one and only arena of human struggle and
achievement, and if man has only his own power to depend
on for the realization of social justice. If these two pro-
positions are true, then we can write over the portals of time
what Dante inscribed on the portals of Hell: "Abandon
hope all ye who enter here." Thus moral and social realism
demands, if revolution is to be effective, the existence of
another dimension, another order of being. It demands a
world transcending time, if social development is to find
ultimate fulfilment. And it also demands some power other
than the human will, if the corrupting element in history is
to be finally overcome. Hence final realization must be the
result of some reality over and above the process of develop-
ment. It was exactly at this point that Niebuhr saw the
profound relevance of the theological ideas and language of
the great Christian doctrines, especially of justification by
faith, to the whole of human history. Justification by faith
affirms that the contradiction of human nature is overcome,
not by historic development, but by divine action, by the
free grace of God. The great classic theological terms,
"reconciliation," "forgiveness," "grace," take on socio-
logical significance. Social change and revolution are finally
validated by faith in divine forgiveness. On the sure founda-
tion of this massive dogma, moral realism and social revolu-
tion join hands. Realism strengthens and intensifies
revolution.

"Mere development of what he now is cannot save
man, for development will heighten all the con-
tradictions in which he stands. Nor will emancipation

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 49

from the law of development and the march of time
through entrance into a timeless and motionless
eternity save him. His hope consequently lies in a
forgiveness which will overcome not his finiteness but
his sin, and a divine omnipotency which will complete
his life without destroying its essential nature. Hence
the final expression of hope in the Apostolic Creed,
'I believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of
the body and the life everlasting,' is a much more
sophisticated expression of hope in ultimate fulfilment
than all of its modern substitutes. It grows out of a
realization of the total human situation which the
modern mind has not fathomed. The symbols by
which this hope is expressed are, to be sure, difficult.
The modern mind imagines that it has rejected the hope
because of this difficulty. But the real cause of the
rejection lies in its failure to understand the problem of
human existence in all its complexity" (Beyond Tragedy,
p. 306). In short, it lies in the continued entertaining
by the modern mind of the illusion of human power.

We are perhaps in a better position now to appreciate the
paradox that Niebuhr had to move to the right theologic-
ally, if he was to continue politically and socially left. It was
orthodox theology that saved him, once he became realist,
from secular cynicism, which is camouflaged despair. Only
a theologically orthodox Christian can continue to be a
revolutionary without illusions about human nature and
the historic process. Niebuhr is one of the rare company
that tries to follow Matthew Arnold's friend, who "saw
life steadily, and saw it whole." He can do that in virtue of
the power and insight he derives from his Christian faith and
theology. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength . . . they shall walk, and not faint."

50 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Since this study is in no sense an attempt to estimate the
place of Niebuhr as a theologian, but purely as a Christian
revolutionary, as one seeking to bring about fundamental
social change as much as possible in accordance with
Christianity, I am not endeavouring to give an account of
his theology as a system. I summarize it in as far as it is a
direct factor in his social attitude which is very far indeed.
So far the vital influence of theology upon his revolutionary
activity is summed up, as we have already argued, in the
doctrine of justification by faith, which has been discussed
simply for its sociological significance. This is not to say that
Niebuhr is concerned with that doctrine only for its
sociology. That would be a perverse misrepresentation of
his position. The Reformers rested the whole weight of the
destiny of the individual upon that doctrine, and. so does
Niebuhr, as a study of his GifFord lectures amply and clearly
demonstrates. But here we are engaged only upon its
application to a social problem. It solved for him the
baffling problem of the contradiction of man's situation in
history. We have now to examine how Niebuhr solved the
problem of making revolution significant, of the relation
between historic frustration and spiritual fulfilment. This
involves the whole problem of the destiny of man both as
individual and society, which presents itself first as the
question: What is the final purpose of the whole historic
process?

This is the point at which the first great distinction
emerges between the Christian revolutionary and the
secular revolutionary; between, shall we say, Lenin and
Niebuhr. It is but rarely that secular revolutionary theory
takes any account of ultimate problems, of questions of final
destiny. Neither Marx nor Engels ever got nearer to them
than vague, romantic generalizations.

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 51

The question of final destiny which is never explicitly
formulated in secular theory must, therefore, be sought for
in the implications of theory. The concrete historical situa-
tions envisaged by secular revolutionaries, particularly by
Marx and Engels, imply, at every point, an unformulated
view of final destiny, between which and the consciously,
systematically defined Christian view there is a gulf, which
no amount of desperate "interpenetration of opposites" by
Christian Marxists (that strange breed!) can ever bridge.
But it seems that the following affirmations can be justly
made about the secular-revolutionary view of final purpose.

(a). At its best and it is by its best it should be judged
the final purpose of this vision seems to be the maximum
development of the personal gifts and talents of the in-
dividual personality. The secular revolutionary conceives
a system of society which will give opportunity for the
individual to achieve full self-expression, to develop all of
which he is capable. Society is the highest reality (or
entity) of human existence. Secular-revolutionary theory
never looks beyond mankind. Self-realization is the goal of
evolution.

(b). The realization of this final purpose will be effected
within time and history. In this view, time is an absolute.

Niebuhr's opposition to all this was so radical that it
involved all the essentials of orthodox Christian eschatology.
In effect, he found in the orthodox doctrines of "the last
things" his philosophy of history, so much so in fact that
they constituted the keystone, the essential idea, of his whole
system of belief. Speaking of the rejection, in his student
days, of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and of
the theological changes in subsequent years, he writes, "Yet
some of us have been persuaded to take the stone which
we then rejected and make it the head of the corner. In other
words, there is no part of the Apostolic Creed which, in
our present opinion, expresses the whole genius of the

52 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Christian faith more neatly than just this despised phrase:
'I believe in the resurrection of the body ' " (op. tit., p. 290).

The supreme purpose of the historic process in the secular
view becomes, according to Niebuhr, a by-product, so to
speak, the fruit or consequence of another, prior purpose.
Christianity teaches that man's chief purpose is to glorify
God, to be obedient to his will, to be in perfect filial fellow-
ship with him. An effect of that fellowship with God, the
relationship to him, is that men will enjoy self-realization.
The satisfaction for which the human ego craves in its
artificial centrality is to be found only in a relationship of
subordination to and dependence upon God. "Seek ye first
the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you." Seek first the right re-
lationship to God, out of which self-realization will come
as a spontaneous, organic growth; give "glory to God in the
highest," not "glory to man in the highest." Modern
civilization is, in fact, the attempt to create by independent
human will what the Kingdom of God grants to a mankind
rightly dependent upon God.

The complete realization of this purpose for all mankind
lies beyond time and history altogether. The fulfilment of
the historic process is beyond history. This view is funda-
mental in all Niebuhr's thinking. On no theme is he more
profound in his thought or more eloquent in his statement.
It is here, too, that the cleavage between Christian revolu-
tionary theory and secular theory is evident and deepest;
where the two attitudes are utterly irreconcilable. History
is inevitably an arena of frustration, of incompleteness. The
goal of all human striving lies in another dimension. History,
in its totality, moves toward the end, in the sense of finis,
as history, in its successive phases, ends. But the final end
(finis) of history will also, says Niebuhr, be identified with
the end as fulfilment, telos. The essential affirmation of
orthodox Christian eschatology is that the end of history

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 53

(as finis) will coincide with the end as telos, fulfilment. "The
culmination of history must include not merely the divine
completion of human incompleteness but a purging of
human guilt and sin by divine judgement and mercy."

The Kingdom of God is itself the fulfilment of history,
which is apprehended in secular thought by partial and
distorting conceptions and ideas, such as "an age of plenty,"
"perpetual world peace," "brotherhood of man," "world
federation," "classless society." These, in fact, are the
expression of the fundamental human sin of "the very effort
of men to solve this problem by their own resources." But
the Kingdom of God has already come into history in Christ.
The end of history (as telos) has preceded the end as finis.
This is the supreme paradox of Christian faith. "... the
Kingdom of God as it has come in Christ means a disclosure
of the meaning of history but not the full realization of that
meaning. That is anticipated in the Kingdom which is to
come, that is, in the culmination of history. It must be
remembered that a comprehension of the meaning of life
and history from the stand-point of the Christian revelation
includes an understanding of the contradictions of that
meaning in which history is perennially involved" (Gifford
Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 297-8).

Niebuhr comprehends the fulfilment of the whole historic
process in the threefold biblical symbolism of the Parousia
(the second coming of Christ), the Last Judgement, and the
Resurrection, which he has systematically discussed in the
second volume of his GifFord lectures (pages 297 to 332).
Here one can attempt but the briefest summary.

The Parousia. In the hope of the return of Christ is affirmed
the ultimate identity of righteousness and power, that in the
end God will overcome all evil. It is the assertion of the con-
viction that the love of God is omnipotent. In the process of
historic development, the omnipotence of love manifests itself
as power to endure the defiance of sin. But that same power.

54 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

to endure will, in the end (finis and telos] reveal itself as
power to abolish and dissipate sin. That is to say, the final
disappearance of sin will be the logical conclusion of the
endurance of sin in time and history. Capacity to endure in
history becomes power to banish in the end. "The vindica-
tion of Christ and his triumphant return is therefore an
expression of faith in the sufficiency of God's sovereignty
over the world and history, and in the final supremacy of
love over all the forces of self-love which defy, for the
moment, the inclusive harmony of all things under the
will of God." There will come a point at which the principle
of contradiction in history, by which all new achievements
in human order are corrupted and disputed, will be over-
come. There will come a point I use this word "point"
rather than the word "moment" or "time" when justice
will cease to breed new injustice, when "all things according
well shall make one music as before."

The Last Judgement. The Last Judgement, says Niebuhr,
enshrines three basic ideas of the Christian philosophy of
history. It states that since Christ himself will be the judge,
history will be judged by the ideal possibility which has
already been known in history. On this point he quotes
Augustine so strikingly that I cannot forbear quoting in
turn: "God the Father will in his [Christ's] personal
presence judge no man, but he has given his judgement to
his Son who shall show himself as a man to judge the world,
even as he showed himself as a man to be judged of the
world." History in its totality, will be judged by the
absolute possibility which man perceived in the relative
situations of historic development. It will be finally evalu-
ated, judged i.e., admitted as true by the "ought," by
the ideal possibility which, though appearing in history,
nevertheless always stood above history. The Last Judge-
ment, that is to say, will be congruent with the manifesta-
tions of historic judgement.

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 55

The second of the basic ideas is the justification of the
historic distinction between good and evil. While the
particular relative distinctions between right and wrong may
have been confused and unjust in the actual historical situa-
tion, that there was an actual distinction to be made will
become manifest in the culmination of history. In social
revolution, the interests of transcendent righteousness
paradoxically join hands with egocentric interestsybr a time,
so that the revolutionary is (mostly) an unconscious instru-
ment of Providence. The distinction between good and evil
in the actual concrete situation, however partially and
wrongly its content may be perceived, is nevertheless
absolute. Hence the Last Judgement affirms that the historic
process is essentially moral. "Morality is the nature of
things" (Bishop Butler).

The third idea symbolized in the Last Judgement is the
denial of any possibility that history can fulfil or complete
itself. The achievements of history, its progressions, do not
constitute stages, so to speak, of the Kingdom of God. The
historic process is not the Kingdom of God by instalments.
Each stage or instalment is marred by the corrupting ele-
ment of man's self-affirmation. Fulfilment comes from God
at the end, yet is nevertheless related to the whole process
of history. The Last Judgement is the unambiguous,
absolute affirmation of man's incapacity to fulfil history
himself.

Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be.
They are but broken lights of Thee
\nd '.

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

A "broken light" gives sufficient light, not to see, but to
"mis-see." It gives a semi-darkness in which objects are
distorted to the vision. "Now we see as in a glass, darkly."
"The idea of a 'Last' Judgement expresses Christianity's

56 REINHOLD NIEBUHR .

refutation of all conceptions of history, according to which
it is its own redeemer and is able by the process of growth
and development to emancipate man from the guilt and
sin of his existence, and to free him from judgement." .

The Resurrection. The symbolism of the resurrection of
the body is, undoubtedly, the one which has called forth the
greatest contempt of the modern secular mind, and the one
about which liberal Christianity has felt most ashamed.
Niebuhr insists that it is a symbol, which like all other
symbols, can be made to appear ridiculous when clothed in
a rational form. But its significance is profound; for it
affirms nothing less than the redemption of history in its
entirety. What will be validated is the whole man, the unity
of body and spirit, not man levitated into a bloodless soul
merely. "On the one hand, it [the Resurrection] implies
that eternity will fulfil and not annul the richness and variety
which the temporal process has elaborated. On the other
hand it implies that the condition of fmiteness and freedom,
which lies at the basis of historical existence, is a problem
for which there is no solution by any human power. Only
God can solve this problem." This symbol affirms, in other
words, that nothing gained in historical development will
be wasted or lost, which is what happens in history only too
frequently. The predominant personal relationships of
feudal society have been almost entirely lost in capitalist
society. As Marx puts it so eloquently in the Communist
Manifesto, "Wherever the bourgeoisie has risen to power,
it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relation-
ships. . . .It has degraded personal dignity to the level of
exchange value." And as the Marxists have not said, socialist
society, if Russia is any criterion, will throw away the
capitalist gain of individual liberty. The symbol of the
resurrection of the body states a law of the moral uniformity
of historical development that no value gained in the
process will be lost "or cast as rubbish to the void."

MOVEMENT TO THE RIGHT 57

Thus Niebuhr, in his endeavour to validate the radical,
revolutionary attitude, discovered that he had to move to
the right. The great slogan in America in the early nine-
teenth century was "Go west, young man." The slogan
uttered to Niebuhr by the spirit of prophecy was "Go
'right,' young man," which he did, as we have seen, with a
vengeance. His movement rightwards had startling results
in that it made of him a very rare kind of revolutionary, as
we shall endeavour to see more fully in the concluding part
of this study. He was, in all probability, a revolutionary by
instinct; to put it in the language of religion, a revolutionary
by a divine call. In order to remain where he was on the
left he had to go right. On the impregnable foundation
of a traditional theology, he has reared a revolutionary social
theory. By a profound biblical Christian dialectic, his
movement to the right involved him in a movement to the
left but the left on to which he moved differed "more
than somewhat" from the left of secular theory.

3

Movement to the Left

TT has become a commonplace to say nowadays that there
Jl can be no revolution without a theory. Part of the great-
ness of Lenin was his realization of this simple but dramatic
necessity which Marx first made clear. Marx's jibe at
Bakunin, the old Russian anarchist, has become famous.
Bakunin, he said, was always mistaking the third month
(of the pregnancy of the revolution) for the ninth. Bakunin
lacked a theory. Lenin, on the contrary, correctly diagnosed
the existence of a revolutionary situation in 1917, though he
was the only one to do so. 1

Whether Marxist theory is an infallible guide to recogni-
tion of the revolutionary "moment" is, at least, arguable.
But there can be no doubt that the first job of the revolu-
tionary is interpretation of events as elements in a develop-
ing situation. And this is pre-eminently what Niebuhr does.
Is it fantastic to suggest that the word "revolutionary" is
a translation into secular terminology of the religious,
theological word "prophet"? And is "revolutionary theory"
a secular version of "prophetic insight"? There is much to
suggest that Marx's theory was much more the product of
his heart than his head; that its service was prophetic rather
than rational. It was insight much more than it was ratiocina-
tion. It is certain, however, that Niebuhr reveals extra-
ordinary insight into the meaning of events in our time, and
that interpretation of the social situation constitutes a very

1 My friend J. T. Murphy, who knew Lenin well, once told me that
Lenin said to him that "he was in a minority of one" in his insistence
that the moment for the seizure of power by the bolsheviks had arrived
in October 1917.

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 59

large and profoundly important part of his activities as a
Christian revolutionary. And as an interpreter, he is certainly
far to the left of conventional ecclesiastical judgement of
affairs.

Rather than attempt a summary of Niebuhr's social and
political judgements, which would inevitably be colourless
and bald, let me endeavour to define the principles of these
judgements, which perhaps will illustrate his move to the
left more satisfactorily. With the aid of these principles,
readers can then turn to Niebuhr's books; for the only
justification of such a study as this is to direct the reader to
Niebuhr himself. 1

I would formulate these principles thus: (a) The relative
character of all historical situations and judgements; (b) The
absolute (or eternal) significance of the relative historical
situation.

Consistent with the dialectical quality of all Niebuhr's
thinking, these two principles partake of the nature of
paradox, and comprehend, in essence, the entire field of his
application of Christian faith to society.

First, then, the relative character of all historical situations
and judgements.

^ One of the abiding common characteristics of all secular
revolutionaries is the tendency to think of their own

1 Whilst everything that Niebuhr writes exemplifies his social and
political theory, I may instance as particularly relevant the following:
Reflections on the End of an Era, Christianity and Power Politics , Moral Man
and Immoral Society. The reader should also pay attention to chapters
four, five and six of An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and the second
volume of the Gifford lectures. His editorials in the quarterly journal of
the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, Christianity and Society, are also of
first-class importance. (Obtainable by annual subscription of five shillings
through the Student Christian Movement Press).

60 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

revolutionary achievement as final. They tend to lose any
awareness if they ever possessed it that their achievement
partakes fully of the defect and partiality of all historic
movements. They never think that their creation will ever
have to be undone; they assume that their aims, when at
last they are realized, have a final significance for history.
In other words, their revolutionary achievements are an
absolute gain for the class or society they represent. Revolu-
tionaries hardly ever manifest any doubts about the signific-
ance of their achievements, which henceforth become some-
thing to be exploited to the maximum of their power.
Having conquered, their triumph has but to be applied.
They harbour no doubts about the adequacy of the instru-
ment for the realization of the aims to which they have
devoted themselves. We never find, on the morrow of
successful revolution, that the revolutionary shows any
awareness that his very success may be the beginning of
defeat of his purpose.

Now this psychology of the secular revolutionary is
natural and almost inevitable. It is beyond the power of
human nature to doubt the thing to which it is most
passionately committed. How can we expect men who have
suffered and endured everything for their cause to believe
that, in the triumph of that for which they have laboured,
is concealed the seed of frustration and defeat? If revolution-
ary human nature were capable of rising to such heights of
objectivity, history would have developed very differently.
But it is clear that revolutions never realize purely the aim
of their architects. In every revolutionary triumph there is
a corrupting element at work, which frequently ordains
that the revolution becomes an instrument to defeat its own
original aims. It destroys historic forms only to embody the
content, the substance of the old forms in new historic
forms. The French Revolution certainly destroyed the bonds
of feudal society. But it most certainly did not achieve its

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 61

threefold aim in a single one of its particulars. Bourgeois
inequalities replaced feudal inequalities.

Now the outstanding characteristic of Niebuhr as a
revolutionary is his awareness of precisely this omnipresent
element of corruption in the whole historic process and
therefore in revolutionary movements. All revolutionaries
can sense this element in the movements which they oppose.
The greatness of Niebuhr is that he senses it in the move-
ments which he champions. There can be no doubt that,
on the whole, Niebuhr is fundamentally more in sympathy
with Marxism than with liberalism, in spite of the shock
which Soviet policies since 1935 have occasioned him. But
he is as clearly aware of the corruption in Marxism as he is
of that in liberalism. His awareness of this element is so
acute that he detects its operation in all movements of
emancipation, with which movements his sympathies and
passions overwhelmingly he. In his Reflections on the End of
an Era he says:

"The executors of judgement in history are always
driven by both hunger and dreams, by both the passions
of warfare and the hope for a city of God. ... To put
the matter in terms of specific history: The cruelties of
Czardom are avenged by the furor of a communism
which so mixes creative and moral elements in its
enterprise with so many primeval passions and so many
of the old cruelties inverted that only a very objective
and sympathetic observer can discern what is good in
the welter or what is evil. It must therefore always be
the purpose of those who try, in a measure, to guide
the course of history to check the desperate brutalities
of a dying civilization in order that the new which
emerges may not be too completely corrupted and
blinded by the spirit of vengeance. . . . tn brief, the
judges of history are always barbarians, whether they

62 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

be Teutonic hordes, beating at the gates of Rome,
medieval tradesmen and townsmen whose commercial
argosies destroyed the power of the lord in his castle,
or modern proletarians, intent on an equalitarian and
collectivist society."

In short, whilst Niebuhr is objectively committed to one
side in the social conflict, he, nevertheless, is subjectively
impartial in that he is clearly aware of the corrupting ele-
ment at work in both sides of the revolutionary debate.

The thoroughness of Niebuhr's prophetic perception in
this respect is proved by his clear-eyed criticism of the
churches in their judgement in social problems. He is
unsparing in his vision of the Protestant and Roman
Catholic Churches alike. The great source of self-deception
in the churches, according to Niebuhr, lies precisely in their
too simple judgements, in their failure to perceive the
relative character of every historical situation, including
their own. Every affirmation of Christianity in social action
is partial, relative and mixed, in that it is compounded of
some vested interest of the Church. It was on this ground
that he criticized the Vatican in its apparent attitude to the
civil war in Spain. Niebuhr vigorously exposed the claim
that Franco and the rebels were defending Christianity. The
elements of power and vested property interests were too
mixed up with a genuine concern for Christian faith to
admit of so simple a judgement. In a similar way, he
criticizes the varieties of Protestant Christianity, of which
his analysis of Buchmanism is as good an example as any.
"The Oxford Group Movement," he writes, "imagining
itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age,
is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we
stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complac-
ency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the
former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 63

decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of
our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not
the Gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world.
It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and moralism
expressing itself in the guise of religion" (Christianity and
Power Politics, p. 156).

The conclusion at which Niebuhr arrives is that final
solutions of social problems are impossible in human history.
All solutions are necessarily partial, incomplete and
dynamically imperfect. That is to say, every solution,
whether achieved by revolutionary means or not, gives rise
to a new form of the particular problem. Every historical
situation is relative. It always remains under the judgement
of the absolute ideal, which defies every attempt at complete
incarnation.

Revolutionaries have always been intolerant. But it makes
all the difference in the world whether intolerance is looked
upon and felt as a virtue or a sin. If it be regarded as a virtue
the corrupting element in every revolution operates without
check or inhibition. If it is felt to be a sin, then the corrupting
element operates under some sort of control. Now. the
great historic significance of Niebuhr's insight into the
relativity of all historical situations and judgements is
precisely that it brings this tendency to intolerance and its
consequent brutality under moral judgement. Revolutions,
of which there is going to be a rich crop in the post-war
world, will be less likely to stultify their historic mission if
the revolutionaries who engineer and guide them will be
men labouring under a sense of guilt for their extravagance
and intolerance. Europe will suffer less if its future explosions
are in the hands of Cromwells rather than Lenins or Stalins.
Can anyone imagine Stalin, for instance, saying "I beseech
you, comrades, in the bowels of The Dialectic, think it
possible you may be mistaken"? Given this insight, which is
characteristic of Niebuhr's whole attitude, revolutionaries

64 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

would acquire a sense of guilt to the infinite blessing of a
tortured humanity.

There is, secondly, the opposite principle: Every relative
historical situation has an absolute significance. In other
words, no judgement of a historical situation is adequate,
unless it is viewed against the background of an order higher
than history. History cannot be fully interpreted in terms
only of itself.

Niebuhr came to understand that it is Christian theology
which alone makes history rational; that if the meaning of
history is to be sought only within the historic process itself,
then it is just meaningless. A dispassionate survey of the
history of civilizations, whatever else it may do, cannot
possibly fortify optimism or faith in the possibility of final
achievement. Historic development is, among other things,
a terrible process of disillusionment and frustration of man's
hopes and dreams. We might consider the example of war.
So far from being a modern dream, the vision of a warless
world is one of the most ancient in human thought, and
persists in face of cumulative disappointment. All the great
wars in modern history have been, in the minds of the
people, wars to end war. That was the promise of the
French revolutionary wars. But nearly 3,000 years ago a
great prophet and reformer saw a world in which swords
had been beaten into plowshares, and every man enjoyed
the security of his own home and work. Three thousand
years are a very long time. If human hope is to be sustained
so one would assume wars during that period should
have declined both in frequency and intensity, even if they
had not disappeared. But in fact they have increased.
2,700 years after the prophet Micah dreamed his noble
dream, we are beating our pots and pans into bombers.
War is threatening to do to-day what it could not have done

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 65

3,000 years ago destroy whole communities and nations
Looking at the story of war and peace in terms of history
alone does not encourage belief in the possibility of universal
peace, but the exact opposite. If history be the only sphere,
Moltke was quite right: peace is a dream. The tired waves
which vainly break on the shores of man's existence in time
and space not only do not seem their painful inch to gain;
they do not, in fact, gain an inch. On the contrary, they have
receded miles. The contemplation of history alone paralyses
the will. If 3,000 years of struggling, preaching, propaganda
result in bigger and more frequent wars, what hope can one
reasonably entertain if history be the only factor?

The situation is no more encouraging if we think of
human happiness and welfare in general: we have only to
contrast the reality of to-day with past anticipations. If
history is man's only reference, how bleak the prospect,
how utterly meaningless the whole story: to fight, to create,
to toil, to dream that at the end we may compete with the
Gadarene swine in the swiftness of descent. If history be the
boundary of man's vision, there is no inspiration whatever
to spur men on in revolutionary struggle.

Niebuhr, as well as seeing the partial, relative character
of history, sees the passing situation, with all its contradic-
tion, against a super-historic backbround. This vision he
derives from Christian orthodoxy. His revolutionary spirit
is fed by theology. The frustrations, stultifications, denials
of historic development are all disciplinary elements in
fulfilment beyond time altogether. Given this hope of a
transcendent fulfilment, the historic, the time-process
becomes meaningful. Its irrationality becomes the overtone
of an undercurrent rational theme. Hence there is value in the
process,, and not only in the goal. Man can travel hopefully.

Niebuhr's theological view of the historic process as
having absolute significance is fortified by the fact that,
where it is denied, one of two things happens. Either some

66 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

substitute view is attempted as an inferior equivalent, or man
falls back on materialism in sheer despair. Marx, of course,
denied altogether the Christian hope of transcendental
fulfilment. He is therefore compelled to anticipate fulfil -
ment in time, which he does, not on scientific historical
evidence (which is hostile), but on myth or "faith." He
assumes the inevitability of historic fulfilment. In fact,
however, Marx's conclusion disappears into non-history.
When at long last the state will have withered away, class
conflict will cease altogether and with it will go the famous
dialectic. Communist society will have no tension. But this
is not history. It is eschatology transposed into the time-key.
The secular alternative to this is crude, vitalistic materialism,
of which Spengler affords a fitting example in his learned
but meretricious Decline of The West wherein, confining
himself to history, he is driven to the appalling conclusion
that civilization is the blind expression of power. All anti-
theological interpretations of historic development are a
variation (with modification) on either secularized escha-
tology or on the crudest materialist vitalism. Marx,
Spengler, Niebuhr these three names typify the varieties
of the possible views of historical meaning. Niebuhr's view
of the absolute significance of the historical situation com-
bines realism towards the facts with a dynamic will to
struggle and to hope.

"Moral life is possible at ah 1 only in a meaningful
existence. Obligation can only be felt to some system of
coherence and some ordering will. Thus moral obliga-
tion is always an obligation to promote harmony
and to overcome chaos. But every conceivable order
in the historical world contains an element of
anarchy. Its world rests upon contingency and
caprice. The obligation to support and enhance it can
therefore only arise and maintain itself upon the basis

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 67

of a faith that it is the partial fruit of a deeper unity
and the promise of a more perfect harmony than is
revealed in any immediate situation. If a lesser faith
than this prompts moral action, it results in precisely
those types of moral fanaticism which impart un-
qualified worth to qualified values and thereby destroy
their qualified worth. The prophetic faith in a God who
is both the ground and the ultimate fulfilment of
existence, who is both the creator and the judge of the
world, is thus involved in every moral situation.
Without it the world is seen rather to be meaningless
or as revealing unqualifiedly good and simple meanings.
In either case, the nerve of moral action is ultimately
destroyed. The dominant attitudes of prophetic faith
are gratitude and contrition; gratitude for Creation
and contrition before Judgement; or, in other words,
confidence that life is good in spite of its evil and that
it is evil in spite of its good. In such a faith both senti-
mentality and despair are avoided. The meaningfulness
of life does not tempt to premature complacency and
the chaos which always threatens the world of meaning
does not destroy the tension of faith and hope in which
all moral action is grounded" (An Interpretation of
Christian Ethics, pp. 115-16).

In accordance with all Niebuhr's thinking, his movement
towards the left is also dialectical i.e., it is a tension
between two apparently opposite principles. First, he denies
the possibility of absolute achievement in any historical
situation, but, second, he nevertheless affirms a more than
relative significance in each historical situation, since his
perception of the situation is in terms of an order trans-
cending it.

68 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Niebuhr's "revolutionism" (may I be pardoned for this
word), which has driven him to the left in politics, is a
necessary consequence of his view that history is dynamic,
which again, in turn, is the result of his biblical view of the
character of human nature. The core and essence of this
view is that man is a unity of vitality and reason, which is
the source of tension and conflict in all social relations. Urge
and stimulus do not reside in reason, but in will, in the
vitalities. Hence history can never "stay put." All achieve-
ments become the springboard for a new drive. Social
growth via conflict is moralized as a struggle for justice. And
it is as a champion of justice that Niebuhr has displayed his
revolutionary attitude. The most important part of his
activity in this respect is, in my judgement, his work as
prophetic interpreter of the social scene, which he does
through his books, his journalism, his preaching and lectur-
ing in the United States and also here in Great Britain.

As Niebuhr came to theological clarity and maturity
he found himself in a hostile environment hostile in the
sense that he was in opposition to the established theological
and social traditions of the American churches. The United
States was the land of the most strongly entrenched capital-
ism in the whole world. Many of the most powerful and
wealthy capitalists were prominent church members, whose
work was largely financed by the big contributions and
bequests of these capitalists. This fact was a considerable
influence in the formation of the individualist and capitalist
character of American Christianity. "Where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also." It is most difficult to be
objective towards institutions on which we depend for our
income and existence. Besides, the United States had come
to full national self-consciousness and greatness through the
capitalist system and ideology, which had been immensely

MOVEMENT TO THE LEFT 69

strengthened by the fact of the frontier "America was a
land of limitless opportunity for everybody." All this was
reflected in the predominantly liberal, optimist theology of
the American Protestant churches. However divided they
were on matters of doctrine, order and ritual, they were
pretty well at one in their social outlook. It was this out-
look to which Niebuhr found himself in opposition.

It speaks volumes for the reality of democratic freedom in
the United States that Niebuhr could publicly criticize the
fundamentals of American social Christianity and, at the
same time, be invited to occupy one of the most influential
positions in American church life. Before the war of 1939
it had become the fashion to sneer at freedom as it operated
in capitalist democracies. This was a Marxist achievement.
"Bourgeois freedom" was a hollow sham, and so on. But
bitter experience has taught us a sobering lesson. We know
to-day that even "capitalist freedom" is precious, and much
to be preferred to the slavery which has been clamped down
on culture and politics in Germany and Russia. It^was a
great thing that, in Niebuhr's case, the men who chiefly
paid the piper did not call the tune. The tune played by
Niebuhr was a fundamental criticism of the accepted
ideology and tradition. By the written and the spoken word,
he trained a constant battery of fire on the hallowed assump-
tions and values of American Christianty. But not only of
American Christianity.

No single thinker has done more that Niebuhr to reveal
the bankruptcy of secular illusions and ideals in our time.
If it is true, as Professor Grant says, that "all revolutions
begin in the minds of men," then Niebuhr is in the front
rank of contemporary revolutionaries, Christian or secular.
By his acute and profound analysis of events and institutions,
by his bold and powerful application of Christian theological
orthodoxy to secular processes and affairs, Niebuhr has
done a great deal to undermine confidence in secular ideas

yo REINHOLD NIEBUHR

and ideals. For thirty years he has poured forth a steady
stream of illuminating social criticism from pulpit and
professorial chair; by books which have been read through-
out two continents; and by weighty and solid periodical
journalism. The importance of all this work cannot be
measured and certainly cannot be over-estimated. One
evidence of its value is that Niebuhr is the Christian the-
ologian most quoted by secular sociologists and publicists
both in the United States and Great Britain to-day. Niebuhr
has done all this work, not as a bookish recluse, but as a
practical man immersed in daily contacts with average
humanity. His movement to the left has shaken loose
American Christianity from its attachment to the right. He
is a standing witness to the power of the individual in a
world that is being strangled by organization.

4

The Christian Revolutionary in Being

HAVING at one time been saturated by Hegelian dialectic,
first in its pure form and later in its inverted Marxist
form, I confess that I find it difficult to disengage my mind
completely from dialectic. The penalty of this baptism by
total immersion is that one tends to see dialectic where
possibly it doesn't exist. Perhaps, therefore, it is somewhat
fanciful or more than somewhat, as Niebuhr's fellow
countryman, Damon Runyon, would say to see the
ubiquitous curse of dialectic in the development of Reinhold
Niebuhr. Let the reader then treat this as a bit of light relief.
In Niebuhr's movement to the right, behold the thesis. In
his movement to the left, behold the antithesis. And in the
Christian revolutionary in being there is the synthesis!
Right-wing theology and left-wing politics, having duly
interpenetrated each other, merge into the grand negation
of the negation to achieve a positive balanced person. But
this presentation of Niebuhr is not all nonsense, though a
great deal of it most certainly is.

Niebuhr is a theologian. It is most necessary to insist on
this point, because it has a most important bearing on any
evaluation of Niebuhr's place and significance. He is a
theologian but a theologian with a difference. He is a
"throw-back" I dare not use the word "reactionary" to
the medieval Catholic and early Reformation tradition of
theology. In modern, post-reformation theology, the word
"theologian" has shrunk into a narrower connotation. It
has come to mean one whose materials of thought are
ecclesiastical experiences, religious experience in the specific
sense of a reference of thought, will and feeling, separate
from the rest of life. The word has come to connote one who

72 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

is concerned with the intellectual presentation of a field of
experience separate from the rest of life, as an artist pursuing
a specialist activity. Now in an earlier tradition theology
was regarded as the religious aspect of the whole of life.
This was the character which Aquinas, for instance, bore as
a theologian. He examined the religious aspect of what we
to-day think of as purely secular activity. But in Aquinas's
day theology was "the queen of the sciences," and therefore
laid all the sciences under toll. The reformers were in the
same tradition, more aggressively, which means that the
tradition of treating theology as the religious aspect of
universal experience was beginning to disintegrate. Political
activity and theorizing was as familiar an element in
Reformation theology as mystical, religious experience in
the narrower sense of the word.

It is this tradition which Niebuhr has done so much to
recover, to the undoubted advantage of theological thinking
to-day. He combines religious thought per se with secular
sociological thought. His work is a genuine synthesis of the
two, and in so doing he has greatly deepened the whole
concept of revolution. He has uncovered a deeper dimension
in revolutionary thought and activity. He shows that,
beneath the political surface of the revolutionary process,
there is a moral theological activity. Revolution, which is
an affair of men, is still more an affair of divine Providence.
To put the same thing in another way, Niebuhr's work as a
theologian is concerned largely with the religious implica-
tions of economic, political and social theory and practice.
One of the first things that impressed me about him was
that here was a theologian who, obviously, had a thorough
knowledge of revolutionary, political theory, a combin-
ation which to me at that time was a striking novelty.
Equipped as he was with the usual religious study, in the
narrower sense of the term, he was additionally equipped
with a thorough knowledge of secular sociology.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 73

This is the synthesis which Niebuhr has achieved be-
tween professional religious knowledge and secular socio-
logical theory. It is this which constituted his fine equip-
ment as a Christian revolutionary. It is this, too, which
endows him with so much authority and significance in an
age of social disintegration. It is this that marks him as a
mature Christian revolutionary in being.

Niebuhr is not only a theorist. Like Marx, he combines
theory with practice, but, unlike Marx, he does not arrogate
the sole right to judge what is correct practice. Marx
founded the First International, and finally wrecked it. One
of Niebuhr's most considerable achievements as a Christian
revolutionary was the part he played in founding, not an
international, but an inter-church Fellowship of Socialist
Christians, which has continued to grow steadily. In
addition to works of practical support of social causes, as
opportunity offers from time to time, 1 it conducts a
thorough-going Christian propaganda of social interpreta-
tion in the pages of its quarterly journal, Christianity and
Society (which originally bore the title Radical Religion).

The amount of writing Niebuhr does in this journal
incidentally illustrates his tremendous energy and vitality.
In every issue he writes the commentary on events as well
as many of the reviews, which reveal that he has read the
books he reviews. It is the commentary, however, which
discloses the Christian revolutionary in full being. There is
nothing else in contemporary Christian journalism quite
equal to it or, for that matter, in secular journalism either.
Mr. Douglas Woodruff, in the Roman Catholic Tablet,
comes nearest which is frequently very near. It is criticism,

1 Here are a few examples: the raising of a special fund to help in the
rescue of anti-nazis in Europe; regular support of refugees from nazism
in Europe; regular conferences on special problems of labour investiga-
tion of special distress among lower-paid workers; study of relations in
America between the Negroes and whites.

74 REINHOLD NIEBHUR

theological, profound and prophetic. I present a few
examples, which illustrate Niebuhr's power of extracting
the permanent issue from the passing event.

In 1938, Karl Barth wrote a letter to a Czech soldier in
which he stated that by waging war against Hitler he would
be defending the liberty of the Church as well as the security
of his own country. Here is Niebuhr's comment:

"We find these judgements astonishing, though we
agree with them politically. They are astonishing
because they come from a man who has spent all his
energies to prove that it is impossible to mix relative
political judgements with the unconditioned demands
of the Gospel. Nothing discredits Earth's major
theological emphasis more than his complete abandon-
ment of his primary thesis in the hour of crisis. . . . We
agree neither with Earth's previous separation of the
Gospel from fateful political and historical decisions
which we as men must make, nor yet with his present
identification of the Czech soldier with the liberty of
the Church of Christ. Surely Barth ought to be the
last man to believe that the Church will be wiped out
if the Hitlers and Mussolinis are not defeated. It may be
forced into the catacombs, but the more the ridiculous
Caesar-gods rage the more apparent it will become that
Christianity is true and that it is the ultimate truth.
The majesty of God is most perfectly revealed in the
movement when the Christ is crucified. The gates of
hell cannot prevail against this Church. . . . On the
other hand it is quite true that the fate of a Christian
civilization may well be decided or could have been
decided by Czech soldiers. There is a difference
between a civilization which seeks to build itself on
the Gospel foundations and one which explicitly defies
the Gospel. This difference is tremendous and it is

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 75

worth fighting for. ... A culture lives in a civilization,
and a civilization is a physical thing which can be
destroyed and can be saved. But a culture is nothing
more than a rationalization of a civilization if it is
not also the fruit of a religion which is not primarily
concerned about the future of cultures and civilizations"
(Radical Religion, Vol. IV, no. i, pp. 4-5).

Here is Niebuhr's interpretation of the German-Soviet
pact of August, 1939:

"What does strike one with horror is the communist
defence of this procedure; the desperate effort which
is being made to keep Russia clad in the shining armour
of righteousness. The communist papers tell us that
Stalin circumvented the Chamberlain policy of appease-
ment, that the fear of the great Red Army brought
Hitler to heel, that Stalin broke the Axis by dissociating
Japan from Germany, etc. This is to make black white
and white black in a fashion reminiscent of nazi
propaganda. The arguments outrage the simplest logic.
A pact which sets Germany free to fight does not
circumvent appeasement. It is appeasement on a larger
scale than ever attempted by Chamberlain. . . . What
appals us particularly is the spiritual poverty which
forces so many people in our era to talk this nonsense
/ in order to save themselves from despair. One must
continue to defend and to extend if possible whatever
decency, justice and freedom still exist in this day when
the lights are going out one by one. One can do that
with clearest vision and courage if one has not placed
one's faith in some frail reed of human virtue which
does not exist. It is well for all Christians who have not
fled into quietism but who have a sense of responsibility
toward the problem of civilization to recognize
clearly that the tragedy of our era is not merely the

76 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

decay of a capitalistic-bourgeois social order; but the
corruption of its alternative socialist order almost as
soon as it had established itself. This does not mean
that the task of advancing democracy to include
economic justice as well as political justice is a hopeless
one. After all bourgeois democracy did succeed in
destroying feudalism, despite Napoleon's treason and,
one might add, despite the degeneration of Cromwell's
city of God into the first tyranny of modern history.
The Kingdom of God is not of this world; yet its light
illumines our tasks in this world and its hope saves us
from despair. The Christian faith stands between the
illusions and the despair of the world; it is particularly
an antidote to the illusions which are stubbornly held
in defiance of the facts in order to save men from
despair" (op. tit., Vol. IV, no. 4, pp. 2-3).

These two examples show the quality of Niebuhr's work
in social criticism and interpretation. He discloses the moral
and spiritual issues involved in the outer event. Nothing
that he has done exceeds in importance this which I do not
hesitate to call "contemporary prophesying." It reveals
history as the arena of a divine Providence.

Turning from the practical activities of Niebuhr to his
character as a Christian revolutionary, let us seek to under-
stand the distinctive principles which determined his
prophetic inspiration and outlook. In other words, what are
the elements into which his long struggle for clarity and
coherence in Christian faith has finally crystallized, which
inspire his revolutionary Christian consciousness? What are
the lights by which "the revolutionary in being" steers his
course in a complex world? I think they can be reduced to
four.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 77

First is the principle of the relevance of an absolute, trans-
cendent gospel to a relative situation; the applicability of Chris-
tianity to every social situation.

Now this principle is not so simple as it seems. It is in
fact one of the profoundest significance. As we have seen,
one of Niebuhr's earliest discoveries was the impossibility
of a direct simple application of Christian ethic to the actual
historic situation. This realization penetrates all his thinking
and all his writing. No theme recurs as frequently as this in
his work. It is the ground on which he chiefly criticizes
liberal Christianity and pacifism. Niebuhr denies that the
Kingdom of God is a historic possibility at all. You cannot
apply what are called the principles of the Sermon on the
Mount to sinful nations and societies in this world any more
than you can play Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" on a
sideboard. The illusion that you can, Niebuhr sees to be the
greatest weakness in pacifism. The sum total of Christian
ethic is contained in the injunction to love our neighbours
as ourselves, the so-called "law of love." The pacifist
assumes that this is a social possibility. But, says Niebuhr, it
is not. It is a delusive simplification of a vast complexity. It
is also a radical confusion and misunderstanding of the
Christian gospel, including its "law of love," which is not
a "law" at all. Christianity is not a revision of Jewish
legalism. "The significance of the law of love is precisely
that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends
all law." Niebuhr will have no truck with the assumption
that the law of love can be made an operative principle in
political and social relationships.

Now the simple, obvious conclusion to be drawn from
this would seem to be that Christianity is not applicable at
all to society, that the Christian faith has no relevance to
history. The fact that Niebuhr did not draw this conclusion
is profoundly significant. The obvious conclusion was a
false conclusion, which suggests that the obvious and the

78 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

true do not always coincide. But this was the conclusion
which Lutheranism, in which Niebuhr was reared, tended
to draw. To say that Luther himself drew this conclusion,
that he handed the state over to the Devil, is much too
unqualified a statement. But there was sufficient in Luther-
anism to lend colour to this idea, as is proved by the fact that
that tendency had crystallised into pietism in Germany by
the eighteenth century. The denial of all relevance of
Christianity to the historic situation, however, was much too
simple. It was in fact a mere inversion of Christian liberalism.
In the undue simplificationof Christianity, the extremes of
pacifism and, shall we say, Bismarckism meet. Niebuhr,
though he denied the possibility of a simple application of
Christian ethic, did not embrace the opposite error of
denying all application. The Christian faith still has relevance
to history. As we have seen, Niebuhr criticized Earth for
his too absolute denial of this very point.

Now without attempting exhaustive discussion of what
Niebuhr conceives to be the nature of the Christian relev-
ance to society, 1 it may be stated that its essence lies in two
directions: as an abiding judgement of human pride and
sin; and as a dynamic approximation to perfect justice. The
significance of these two statements will perhaps be better
appreciated if we understand first of all what Niebuhr means
by the Gospel.

"The good news of the Gospel is not the law that we
ought to love one another. The good news of the
Gospel is that there is a resource of divine mercy which
is able to overcome a contradiction within our souls,

1 The reader is referred to An Interpretation of Christian Ethics for his
discussion of this problem, especially to chapters iv, v and vi. The idea
that Christianity still is relevant when its ethics is not applicable is so
great a violation of conventional assumptions that the reader may find
it difficult to comprehend. Persistent study of Niebuhr will reward the
seeker on this point.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 79

which we cannot ourselves overcome. The contradic-
tion is that, though we know we ought to love our
neighbour as ourself, there is a law in our members
which wars against the law in our minds. So that, in
fact, we love ourselves more than our neighbour.
The grace of God which is revealed in Christ is re-
garded by Christian faith as, on the one hand, an actual
'power of righteousness' which heals the contradiction
within our hearts. In that sense Christ defines the actual
possibilities of human existence. On the other hand,
this grace is conceived as justification,' as pardon
rather than power, as the forgiveness of God, which is
vouchsafed to man despite the fact that he never
achieves the full measure of Christ. In that sense
Christ is 'the impossible possibility.' Loyalty to him
means realization in intention, but does not actually
mean the full realization of the measure of Christ. In
this doctrine of forgiveness and justification, Chris-
tianity measures the full seriousness of sin as a perman-
ent factor in human history. Naturally the doctrine
has no meaning for a secular civilization, nor for the
secularized and moralized versions of Christianity.
They cannot understand the doctrine precisely because
they believe there is some fairly simple way out of the
sinfulness of human history" (Christianity and Power
Politics, pp. 2-3).

What Niebuhr calls here "a contradiction in our souls" is
a complex of two things, that in fact man never satisfies
the ideal, but nevertheless believes that he can. But the
belief is an illusion. Man never will satisfy the ideal. The
illusion that he will is a protection for his pride, which,
once broken radically broken would reduce man to
despair. So all history, civilization and culture are a con-
spiracy to defend man's pride, which they effect by the

8o REINHOLD NIEBUHR

renewal of illusion. Now Christianity as judgement is
precisely to bring man to despair, which is reality, to the
acknowledgment of his utter inability ever to fulfil the ideal.
But in the realization of that very despair lies man's great
hope; for in the realization of despair judgement becomes
mercy. Despair becomes the venue of a rebirth of the whole
man. And this is the profundity of the relevance of Christian
faith to every historical situation. It is to deprive man of his
pride, which dooms civilization to perpetual frustration.
Christianity as judgement is the point of a new leverage in
historical development.

By insisting then upon the relevance of the Gospel to the
whole of life, Niebuhr is enabled to extract from every
situation its maximum contribution to the moral well-being
of society and the individual.

The second principle is that the historic process is envisaged
always in terms of person. Niebuhr s revolutionism is for the
release of personality.

The abiding sin of reformers and revolutionaries is the
tendency to 'black-out' the individual. And it always
happens to a greater or less degree, generally greater. In the
totalitarian socialisms of to-day, this tendency becomes
practically absolute. In the national-socialism of Germany
and the Soviet socialism of Russia the individual counts for
next to nothing. It is the objective process that matters.
This is the final logic of something inevitable in the revolu-
tionary temper, though it is not inevitable that it should
achieve its final logic. Once we become involved in "move-
ments" we imperceptibly begin to think of the historical
results of our activities as things somehow divorced from
people, from individuals of flesh and blood, who laugh and
cry, eat and drink and sleep, suffer and rejoice. It is the

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 81

supreme sin of all revolutionary movements. Opponents
are, of course, absolutely divested of personality. They are
objectified, categorized, depersonalized. They are "they"
capitalist class, ancien regime, the exploiters or what-not.
They cease to be thought of as human. If revolutions teach
anything at all, they surely demonstrate that the dehuman-
ization of opponents inevitably leads to the dehumanization
of allies and supporters too. That is why the great historic
revolutions always devour their own children none
more so than the most recent of the series, the Russian
revolution.

The source of this is the divorce in our vision between
process and person. The process becomes a thing-in-itself,
a vested interest, for the defence of which individuals come
to be regarded as instruments. Revolutions, alas!, are a
necessity in a world of irrational humanity. But they breed
a temper more vicious, cruel and callous than that which
wars breed. Witness the disturbances in liberated Greece:
the Greek factions hated one another more than they did
the Germans. I experienced the same thing directly in Spain
during the civil war: anarchist and communist hated each
other far more than either hated Franco. The individual
vanished as a person. He is transformed into a mere element
in a process, from whence proceeds a tragic result; the aims
of revolution are lost in the whirlpool of power, and the
struggle to maintain it.

Niebuhr thinks fundamentally in terms of the person.
Not only does he think in terms of the person, he also feels
in the same terms. That is to say, in this matter of historic
process and personality, his thought and emotion are
integrated. Niebuhr would be the last man in the world to
claim that he is immune from the poison of power. But it
makes all the difference in the world in revolutionary action
and procedure whether the exercise of power has to contend
with settled convictions which can check and delimit the

82 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

inevitable abuse of power. This is precisely the social and
political significance of personalism, of the envisaging of
process as an affair of living men and women. The same
truth can be put in another way. The secular revolutionary
loves mankind, humanity. The Christian revolutionary
loves men, individuals. The significance of this distinction
cannot be exaggerated for politics and social action. Love
for mankind can be Combined with hatred for the individual,
which is one of the most appalling characteristics of revolu-
tionary fervour in European history. One thinks, for in-
stance, of the father of that tortured individual, Mirabeau.
He was known as "Friend of the People"; but his treatment
of his son was cold and cruel. It is fatally easy to love man in
the mass, because no attitude lends itself more conveniently
to the camouflaging and rationalization of self-love and
will-to-power as a passionate love for man in the mass. Like
every other human activity, love for man as person lends
itself also to the corrupting element of sin and pride but
with more difficulty, since the relationship is direct. Self-
deception has less room in which to hide in a direct personal
relationship than in remote institutional relationships. This
goes back to Niebuhr's days in Detroit. As we have already
learnt, the social problem presented itself to him then in
the shape of concrete individuals, whose problems, anxieties
and conditions were his personal care. That habit or attitude
he has carried with him to this very day. It has shaped and
moulded his whole social theory. And not only his social
theory. The profound Christian character of his sociology
determines his view of the entire historic process as one of
ultimate personal release. In the last analysis, Niebuhr's
vision of human fulfilment is not Utopia, but the Com-
munion of Saints, which admirably defines the difference
between men as a mass and man as a person.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 83

The third directive principle is awareness of the operation in
oneself of the element of corruption which is seen to be operating
in the whole historic process. Theologically expressed, the prophet
himself also stands under the judgement which he pronounces
upon society.

Here again, this is a principle (or achievement) which
looks much simpler than it really is. The proof of the depth
and complexity of this principle is the fact of the rarity of
its realization. How many preachers, for instance, are aware
of the extent to which they are involved in the sins they so
confidently condemn? The confidence of their condemna-
tion is a demonstration of their unconsciousness. True
prophecy is not a mere pronouncement, but a burdened
utterance, for it tells of a doom which involves the prophet
himself. Careless rapture may be the experience of the artist
and poet. But the prophet is not an artist: he is an oracle.
How many revolutionaries (to take another example) are
there who are conscious of the degree to which they partici-
pate in the very exploitation which they professedly abhor
or, which is much less, are aware of the mere fact that they
do participate to even the slightest degree?

As has already been argued, revolution particularly breeds
self-righteousness, and revolutionaries generally see them-
selves as "innocent of the great transgression." The factional
struggle for power in Russia after the death of Lenin
exemplifies cruelly this moral and spiritual unconsciousness.
And this unawareness of self-corruption in the bolshevik
revolutionaries was appallingly costly in human lives. The
world, in all probability, will never have the opportunity
to study the statistics of the gigantic butcheries of the Stalin-
Trotsky conflict. We can see the operation of the same sin
in the wider arena of international strife. The victor's
delusion that he is innocent altogether has nearly always

84 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

been the seed of a new fatal political development. This does
not mean, for example, that we should make no distinction
between nazi crimes of policy and Allied policy. Doffing the
white sheet of innocence does not mean that we should don
the black sheet of the enemy. This is where so many
pacifists violate the most elementary moral realities. There
is a vast relative difference between what the nazis have done
and even the worst things that the Allies have done. But
Europe will more quickly recover health and sanity if the
victors show some awareness that they too have had some
responsibility for the sin of nazism.

This simple-seeming principle, then, has profound, far-
reaching and incalculable consequences for society. It can
make a difference of life and death for millions of human
beings. It can make a difference between intolerable misery
and suffering and quiet happiness for still greater millions
of ordinary human beings, who ask for nothing more than
the right to pursue their own way of life, to enjoy the
intimate delight and to suffer the petty irritations of daily
family routine. And it can make the difference of progress
and decay for whole civilizations. We too readily assume
that simply because certain events did happen that they
were bound to happen, that nothing different could have
happened, which does not follow. Given the domination
of the character of statesman and revolutionary by pride,
by hubris, the congruent event is almost inevitable. But the
unchecked sway of pride is not inevitable. For instance, it
is not unreasonable to assume that, had the First Inter-
national been guided by Engels instead of Marx, its history
would have been different. The whole point of Christianity
in relation to personal character is that the miracle of change
is always a real possibility. Simultaneous change in all the
actors of a particular social situation is not a historic pos-
sibility, with the result that the application of the maximum
wisdom in any given situation is not a possibility either.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 85

But sufficient change to modify a situation is a historic
possibility.

Not the least of the many contributions which Niebuhr
has made both to theology and sociology has been his
demonstration of the implications for politics of Christian
virtues. When these are made plain in the way Niebuhr has
shown, then they seem obvious and platitudinous. But that
is always the case. Nobody has quite revealed the profound
political implications of simple Christian humility as
Niebuhr has done; it looks ordinary when demonstrated.
But what a difference to society a practical demonstration
would make is sufficiently suggested by the example of
Niebuhr himself. His realization that the corruption which
he sees in action in the things and people he criticizes is
operating also in himself makes of him a rare kind of
revolutionary. It makes a revolutionary who is not only
emancipated from illusions about the decaying order, but
also unburdened by illusions about the emerging order.

The fourth of the principles defining the equipment of "the
revolutionary in being" is that comprehension and balance are the
result of appreciation of the truth in both sides of the conflict; in
the appropriation of the permanent values both of tradition and of
progress, of the old and the new.

Niebuhr is, in other words, a true "dialectician." It is this
quality in him which makes his writing difficult to so many
people. But a little reflection should show that, in the
dialectical character of his thinking and writing, Niebuhr
reduces to self-conscious science what is confused and
unconscious in the unthinking mind. Nobody in fact lives
and thinks in terms only of the moment. Such a process is
inconceivable. We all of us, the untrained and the most
highly trained, unconsciously relate the past to the present.

86 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

We carry and preserve much of the old in our appropriation
of the new. We do not start every day de novo. We per-
petuate something of the past in all our thinking. Dialectical
thinking is a refinement and a complication of that habit
and process.

Now if, as Hegel maintains, the synthesis is an integration,
a weaving into one, of the abiding elements in the thesis and
the antithesis, then nothing can be more undialectical than
to think of the old, the traditional, the passing order, in
terms of destruction only. This is, in fact, the style and
accent of so much Marxist propaganda, in which capitalism,
for example, has become wholly evil. This is the great
defect of secular Utopian thinking. Change has become a
good in itself. Change for change's sake, in short. This too
is what makes the secular left such a menace to civilization.
It leads to a depreciation of tradition, which G. K. Chesterton
called "the democracy of the dead." Tradition must be a
contemporary factor if civilization is to remain healthy and
secure. The votes of the dead should at least be weighed.
But Utopian, progressive secularism tends to see good only
in the future, which means, in fact, that it never sees any
good at all; for the future never comes. In the moment of
becoming it ceases to be future. It becomes only the drab
present bereft of the good which was envisaged yesterday.

Now Niebuhr sees the vitality of tradition as well as the
dynamic of progress, the future against the background of
the past. The most obvious example of this in his case is his
apparently paradoxical balancing of traditional (orthodox)
theology and progressive politics "right in theology and
left in politics."

This effective dialectical habit has made possible for
Niebuhr the rare achievement of being able to retain the
gains, the insights, which he has won from ideas and a mode
of thinking since discarded; he carries them forward into
new attitudes, when the old are transcended. He treasures

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY IN BEING 87

the substance though the form disappears. Most thinkers lose
the insights which came to them through ideas since
abandoned. The essence of an idea, belief, creed or attitude
can only be apprehended and appropriated from the inside.
One can only feel or see the essence of toryism, for instance,
by being a tory really and truly. Niebuhr has never been a
tory: but he has been many things which he is no longer,
and the insight gained from those abandoned philosophies
he still retains. In the last war he was a pacifist, and if the
reader makes a study of his booklet Why the Christian Church
is not Pacifist, he will see an example of Niebuhr's per-
petuated insight. This is why his thought is so rich and
comprehensive.

This principle it is which makes of Niebuhr the rarest of
all kinds of revolutionaries the balanced revolutionary.
Revolutionaries are necessarily extremists. Most of them are
singular extremists i.e., obsessed with one idea or attitude.
Niebuhr is also an extremist, but a plural extremist. He is
obsessed with opposing extremes, whose tension makes for
balance. And this is the true Christian revolutionary attitude.
He keeps in tension time and eternity, which meet in man.
This is what makes for Christian dynamic. G. K. Chesterton
has described the paradox of Christian virtue and character
in Orthodoxy, where he says that the truly Christian man
practises opposite virtues to extravagance. To preserve in
relation opposing elements, as Niebuhr does, makes for
width as well as depth. It also makes for tolerance and charity.
Niebuhr nourishes the old through its integration into the
new.

Here then we see the revolutionary in being responsible,
human and humane; humble and burdened, and balanced
and comprehensive. It is a formidable combination of
qualities. It helps to explain his increasing influence on
thoughtful people in two continents.

5

"The Theory of the Permanent Revolution'

I HAVE borrowed the title of this section from Trotsky's
book of the same name. In a very much profounder
way, Niebuhr's view of Christianity commits the Church,
as the historic agent and vehicle of the Gospel, to a "theory
of permanent revolution" in the literal sense. It commits
the Church to a fundamental opposition to the world till
the very end of time. Trotsky's permanent revolution was
only pseudo-permanent, because he envisaged its fulfilment
within history indeed within the contemporary phase of
history. But Niebuhr's revolution is synchronous with the
whole of the time-process and beyond. If the Church is to
be faithful to her Lord and his Gospel, she must wage war
against the world for the entire duration of history, until it
is swallowed up in the eternal order. This is permanent
revolution indeed.

Sufficient has been said in preceding pages to indicate
Niebuhr's conviction that the Kingdom of God is not a
possibility for history. His whole outlook is so saturated
with this conviction that it can be said, without the least
exaggeration, that it comes out in every other sentence of his
written work. This conviction has probably been the source
of the most prolific misunderstanding of Niebuhr's teaching.
This misunderstanding has been so crass, in some cases, as
to accuse him of being an escapist from history a thing
against which he is constantly at war. Whatever charge can
be levelled against Niebuhr, one thing of which he cannot
possibly be justly accused is of running away from the
attempt to deal christianly with the historic situation. The
application of the Gospel to history and the real manner in

THE THEORY OF THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION 89

which that may be done is the connecting theme of all his
work and it can be illustrated by a remark of Dr. Orchard's.
Castigating the too-easy American attitude to divorce, "In
some of the American states," said Orchard, "divorce can
be obtained on the ground of 'incompatibility of tempera-
ment.' Why! that is the object of marriage!" So it may be said
of Niebuhr, that the object of all his thinking is to discover
how the Gospel can be applied to civilization. His denial
that the Kingdom of God is a historic possibility is for the
purpose of clearing the ground of illusions and miscon-
ceptions, so as to discover how it can really and truly be
applied.

This ludicrous misinterpretation of Niebuhr arises, as
suggested in my preface, from a too innocent unfamiliarity
with the dialectical character of his thinking. Men trained,
as we nearly all have been trained, in the tradition of a too
formal logic, with its simple "either . . . or" find it difficult
.to adapt themselves to the more complex processes of a
more realistic logic with its "both . . . and." Niebuhr is
painfully aware of the deeper complexity of existence,
which is missed by the clearer rationalist. His richer per-
ceptions are partly due to his realization of the fact of
original sin. "The truth is," writes Niebuhr, "that, absurd
as the classical Pauline doctrine of original sin may seem to
be at first blush, its prestige as a part of the Christian truth is
preserved, and perennially re-established, against the attacks
of rationalists and moralists by its ability to throw light
upon complex factors in human behaviour which con-
stantly escape the moralists." Inability to perceive the tragic
contradictions of human nature strengthens the attachment
of the simple rationalist and the still simpler moralist to the
inadequate ratiocinative processes of formal logic. A doc-
trine of logic which makes inconsistency in thinking the
greatest intellectual sin incapacitates men from appreciation
of concrete, objective inconsistencies of act and will which

90 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

do in fact exist. That js what history is a complex of
contradictory acts, policies and institutions.

It may be well, therefore, to say that, though Niebuhr
denies the possibility of historic realization of the divine
Kingdom, he strenuously insists that the Kingdom is,
nevertheless, operative in history.

"It is important to recognize that the Kingdom of God,
according to the biblical conception, is never purely
an other-worldly perfection, not even when it is
interpreted in a gospel which is directed primarily to
the Greek world. The Christian is taught to pray
constantly 'Thy Kingdom come/ The hope of this
prayer, when vital, is a constant pressure upon the
conscience of man in every action. The kingdom which
is not of this world is in this world, through man and
in man, who is in this world, and yet not altogether of
this world. Man is not of this world in the sense that
he can never rest complacently in the sinful standards-
which are normative in this world. He may be selfish
but he cannot accept selfishness as the standard of con-
duct. He may be greedy but he knows that greed is
wrong. Even when his actions do not conform to his
ideals he cannot dismiss his ideals as irrelevant. . . .
The kingdom which is not of this world is always in
this world in man's uneasy conscience." 1

The permanent revolution is thus involved, not only in
the conflict between the relative achievements of history
and the absolute ideal, but also in the character and structure

1 Beyond Tragedy, pp. 278-9. The reader should ponder the whole
chapter from which die above passage is quoted. It is an address entitled
"The Kingdom Not of this World." It is an excellent example and one
of the less difficult ones of Niebuhr 's way of thinking.

THE THEORY OF THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION 91

of human nature, which is itself a tension of two worlds,
two orders of being. Man is a two-dimensional entity, and
cannot therefore escape the fate of an unresolved con-
tradiction in the present time-order. But does not the theory
of a permanent revolution involve a theory of organization
for conducting it? In other words, the theory of a church?
It is in trying to answer this question that there is ground
for a legitimate and much more serious criticism of
Niebuhr.

In any realist discussion of the problem of the" relation
between Church and World, of the distinction and opposi-
tion between them, the question of the nature 1 * of the
Church as an organized body is fundamental and inescapable.
If the Gospel is first of all, as Niebuhr says, a proclamation
of the mercy and judgement of God, if the redemption of
mankind is wholly the work of God, it is clear that without
a body committed whoUy to that proclamation it cannot be
historically operative and effective. In other words, the
historic witness to the Gospel necessitates a church; for
without a church the Gospel would be lost in human dis-
integration and corruption. Without a church, in other
words, the Christian revolution loses its permanence. The
Gospel would be corrupted into identification with the
current, conventional moralities. The Church alone has
preserved the Gospel as a transcendent distinctive reality in
the world. Whenever, for instance, the formulation of
doctrine has threatened the distinctiveness of the Gospel as
Redemption, as in the Arian controversy, it was the Church
that saved the situation. Whenever, again, the Church has
threatened to become wholly ineffective as the historic
guardian of the Gospel, as in the era of the Reformation, it
is the Holy Spirit within the Church not diffused through
society, but within the sacramental body of the Church
that has re-fashioned the Church to its essential mission. The
discussion, therefore, of the Church as a historic, organized

92 . REINHOLD NIEBUHR

entity, is not a mere ecclesiastical luxury. It is fundamental
to the Gospel

It is on this question that Niebuhr is theologically defec-
tive. His neglect of this whole field of theology does afford
legitimate ground for criticism. His absorption in the
various issues of the Gospel as an independent proclamation,
as an entity in itself, in its transcendental aspect divorced
from its historic community with the Church, has resulted
in a neglect of a fundamentally significant field of theology.
It has been said justly, for instance, that Niebuhr is very
"cavalier in his attitude to the question of ministerial order." 1
This is symbolical of a radical defect in Niebuhr's outlook.
Perhaps, deep down, this is what Canon Raven and others
feel and mean when they say that Niebuhr is "not a
theologian." It is his unawareness of the importance of all
those questions which in the narrower sense are conceived
within the Church in her relation to herself, so to speak. He
has concentrated, to an undialectical extent, on the problem
of the relation of the Gospel to civilization to the almost
complete neglect of its relation to the Church. I give one
example of this.

What is the significance and value of episcopacy in the
economy of the Church? As far as I know, Niebuhr has
nowhere raised or explored this question, which is vital to
the existence of the Church, and therefore to the whole
problem of the relation between Christianity and civiliza-
tion. 2 Whatever else may be charged against him, the one
thing he cannot be accused of is indifference to the problem

1 By the Rev. A. R. Vidler, who is excelled by nobody in appreciation
of Niebuhr.

2 Here we must write with some reserve. I am familiar with every-
thing which Niebuhr has published in book form and also with a great
deal of his journalism. It is possible, of course, that he has written on
questions of church organization etc., and that these writings have
escaped me which I doubt. None of them are in book form. Neither
has any hint of these questions come out in personal discussions.

THE THEORY OF THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION 93

of the relation of Christianity to civilization. Yet the
effectiveness of the Gospel as a historic power depends on a
question which has very little place in Niebuhr's thinking,
in so far as his thinking is evidenced by his published work.
Is episcopacy of divine ordination, which is the Catholic
(not simply Roman) contention? Is it a necessity of church
constitution? Can the Church continue to function effec-
tively without it? From this question arises a whole range of
cognate questions what constitutes ordination, ministerial
authority, the place of the sacraments? These questions
every one of them are not merely ecclesiastical, but are,
finally, of profound sociological significance. Just as Lenin's
theory of party constitution has been vital for the develop-
ment of the Russian revolution, which, in its turn, has been
of enormous significance for Europe and the world (and is
going to prove of still greater significance in the post-war
world), so this question of episcopacy and cognate issues is
ultimately vital for civilization, as well as for the Church.
The theory of the permanent revolution the Christian
revolution is tied up with it. It is therefore not too much
to argue that Niebuhr's neglect of this field of theology is
a serious inadequacy, both for a theologian and for a
Christian revolutionary.

The inevitable tendency of Niebuhr's work, however, is
towards the sharpening of the issue of Church versus World.
No contemporary theologian has done more to define that
issue in current terms. The net result of his work is to com-
pel us, even the secularists amongst us, to essay a recon-
sideration of the place and significance of the Church as an
historic institution, responsible for the safe-keeping of the
Gospel and its eternally valid message. To the criticism
which I have made here of the balance of his work, Niebuhr
may well reply that no man can possibly cover the whole
field of Christian theology. And that, of course, is true. But
this does not altogether meet the point, which is that what

94 REINHOLD NIEBUHR

is true and valid in one's own thinking inevitably suffers
some distortion when it is not balanced by its complement.
The necessary balancing problem of the Gospel in relation
to civilization is the Gospel in relation to the Church. The
tenor of Niebuhr's work is, in fact, to focus that issue more
decisively. And for this, every thinking Christian man
which does not, unhappily, . mean every Christian man
will be duly grateful. In this as in every other aspect of
Christian thought and practice, Niebuhr is always, in the
finish, "on the side of the angels."

Reinhold Niebuhr is a gift of God to a tortured and
troubled world. He is, by any standard of judgement
whatsoever, a leading, if not the leading, theorist in the
contemporary revolution in Christian thought. He has made
orthodox theology relevant to our secular crisis. He has
made it intellectually respectable. In our optimistic youth,
many of us drifted into liberal Protestantism because we
shared too easily the assumption that orthodoxy was
intellectually discredited. It had ceased to be fashionable. It
was out of date. Every bright young thing was modernist
by definition. Niebuhr has powerfully helped to change all
that. Nowadays, it is the old who are theological liberals.
The young, who as always tend to swim with the tide, are
orthodox. Niebuhr has been one of the influences that have
reversed the theological tide. But he has done more than
that. By his prophetic insight and passion, he has made the
Christian faith an inescapable social issue for a generation
whose own secular faith has proved to be bankrupt. This
achievement makes his place secure in the apostolical
succession of Christian revolutionaries.

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